Give Me Time
by onlylivingboy
Summary: You never get as much as you need...
1. Prologue

**PROLOGUE**

I walked out of the room, shutting the door behind me, muting out all of the beeps and stutters of the machines, the angry red dots of noise that they kept yelling. My life had become these machines and the story that they told. It was a story of sameness.

For a month, she had been the same.

It was time to end the story.

I leaned back against the glass door, waiting for the cold feel of it to seep through my shirt and into my skin. I wanted to ice down, too, to freeze solid and never move again. Then we'd be the same, me and her. The same and still different, like we always were. When I pressed my hands against my eyes, they slipped a bit on the tears, but I was able to rub hard, make the dark hollow of blindness explode with fireworks. It looked like the Fourth of July there, all red and yellow and streaks of blue. I didn't want the light to end; I pressed harder.

A hand touched my shoulder. "Are you ready?" a nurse asked. "Dr. Wilks came—he wants to be the one to do it."

I swallowed hard and crossed my arms over my chest, holding my ribs as hard as I could. "I'm not ready," I gulped, swatting at my eyes. I couldn't stop crying. We had changed places—I was the crybaby now, not her. I was the one who teared up at everything, every little thing that reminded me of her and of us and of this. Even postcards made me cry, empty postcards at the bookstore.

Postcards were things for secrets, you know. We never kept secrets from each other.

I looked at the nurse. Was her name Shelly? Sarah? I couldn't remember. "I need to find my parents, and then I'll do it," I told her, taking in a deep breath.

"They're over in the hallway," Shellysarah said, pointing through the glass doors. There was my mother, my father, the two of them holding hands and talking with their heads bent close. I stared at them—they were growing old together, weren't they. They had been together for over twenty years; I had been born so quickly after they were married. Just ten months later. They were married, they had a family, they were in love.

How come they got the time to do all of that? They were so lucky, for a moment, I hated them. I did. I had to look away, staring at them hurt so badly.

But when I glanced back, I saw them coming towards me, my mother's arms rising up to gather me like I was still just a little boy. I had seven inches on her, maybe seventy pounds, but I felt like she was able to reduce me to the same size I was when I was seven, when I had fallen out of a tree and walloped my arm against the concrete of the road. She had kissed my broken bone and smoothed my hair off of my forehead and told me that everything would turn up just right.

I didn't cry then. I wasn't much of a crier until I met Mary Anne.

The way her palms touched my spine, though, just made me want to sob. This was my mother, this was her trying to make this okay. And she couldn't. No one could. It was impossible, it was all lost.

I turned from her to my father, and his hand reached around my neck and pulled me to him. My father rarely touched me, he didn't put his hands on me in anger or in happiness. Our hands would meet, maybe we would let a forearm slip around to the other's back, but nothing that required closeness, the way that you _hold_ someone in your arms. But he was clutching me tight, his fingers daggers in my shoulder, the flat surface of his palm rubbing into my back like my mother had done. I felt a pressure surrounding me, and I realized that I was nesting in between their bodies.

My parents were trying to protect me. Shelter me.

It was too late, though. It was all too late.

I remembered what we had said to each other the night before, the way that they were holding me too hard, too desperately, like they were afraid I would disappear. Do you do that when you let go of your other half? Do you just evaporate in that instant? Or worse—you hollow out and still have to drag yourself around because there _are_ other reasons to live. I had written those reasons on my right hand so that I wouldn't forget. I had written them on the crooked lines of my palm so that I could hold her hand and lose her but still hold hard to why I couldn't follow.

I couldn't, no—I _wouldn't_. I could, and maybe I should, but I won't. At least I'm pretty sure that I won't. Almost sure. My parents weren't letting go; they were trying to wring that out of me. Was it that simple? I wasn't sure of anything, and I have spent so many years fixating on what is right. What is right, what I can be sure of, and focusing all that I have into those things.

I know that I am smart. Focus it into school.

I know that I am talented when you put me in a pair of sneakers and hand me a ball. Focus it into basketball.

I know that I love Mary Anne. Focus it into us.

That's all I get. Everything else, I can be wrong, so amazingly wrong it takes my breath away. I am left a gasping, hollowed thing so many times. Look how quickly things change, look how quickly things can fall apart. There are six billion other people on this planet, everyone has their own list of things that make them right and strong and focused. Everyone has needs and wants, and we all crash together and try to find our own place.

Sometimes, your place overlaps with someone else. When they leave, you get more room.

I don't want room. I want her. I need her. But she's been gone for a long time: I have to tell myself that over and over, as if it will make things okay. She is gone, this is what I need to do. She is gone, this is what she would want.

But Mary Anne is a fighter. Mary Anne said, _No dying_. How can this be what she wants? Why can't her father be the one to decide? Why does it have to be me?

Because I married her. How _stupid_ was that? It's incredible: in less than a month, I'll be able to drink, and I will have already been married and widowed. I'm going to buy the largest bottle of vodka at Liquor Mart and swim all the way to the bottom. I haven't drank since I was sixteen. It was going to be an interesting night.

And she wouldn't be there. _When you turn twenty-one, I am _so_ not cleaning up your puke—you tell your stupid guy friends that whatever damage they cause, they are responsible for dealing with it_, she had laughed on my birthday last year.

_Big talk, little follow-through_, I teased, reaching over the cake she had made to tug on one of her dark curls. _You're so gonna be there—lecturing me, sure, but you'll be there to help my drunk ass to bed_.

She had ducked her head against her chest, trying to scowl, but she folded back into a smile and leaned across the table to kiss me, her face a golden thing in the candlelight. I reached for her, sliding the cake out of the way so that I could climb to her. I always followed her—I couldn't be sure of things, so I stole from her map, the confidence that rode in her skin. Leading me to her, leading me home.

Where would I belong if Mary Anne was gone? The library, the classroom, the court. Who is that guy, though? A guy without a home.

My parents were creating a kind of heat around me, pressing me back into warmth. My mother rested her head between my shoulder blades, those things that look like wings. I had my head on my father's shoulder, and he turned his head so that his mouth was near my ear.

"I love you, you know that, right?" he said, and I nodded into his skin. I did.

"I love you, too," my mother sighed, tucking her arms between me and my father. Her fingers curled over my ribs, that place that could crack and break, those things that are supposed to protect your heart. They had been worthless. My heart was gone, it was a missing thing, it was lying on a bed with Mary Anne, it had fled to wherever it was that she had gone.

"She's with her mother," my own mother told me last night. "She's happy, Logan, I swear. She's with her mother, with her best friend—Barbara? And the British boy from Yale. They're all together, they're all okay, I promise."

"She's not with us, though. She's not with Dawn or her folks or Stacey and her girls or anyone here," I mumbled back. She's not with me. Come back, come back. She was so good at coming back—why hadn't she? Maybe it was a question of could. She would if she could. I hoped. She had chosen _us_ over her mother once before.

Of course, Barbara had been alive then. But there was someone alive _now_ that I couldn't imagine Mary Anne ever leaving—she wouldn't leave what she had fought so hard for, would she?

Dad took a step back and put his hands on the side of my face. "Are you ready?"

"No," I said, and Mom gripped harder on my chest. "But…I just said goodbye. I guess I shouldn't drag this out any more, should I."

"Do you want us to go get her family?" Mom asked, slipping around to stand at my side.

I shook my head. "I said I'd do it, and then go into the waiting room and tell them when she was…gone. Well, more gone than she is."

"That she's died," my father supplied.

"Yeah," I breathed, slumping down on him again. After a moment, I pulled back and gave my body a hard shake. Come on, Logan, game on. Game on. But Mary Anne hated my game face, she hated the way I was when I played. How could I be strong and not be the person that she didn't like? How could I get through this? Without her.

Mom reached up and touched my head, the back of it, the small line in the bone from where I had once cracked my head open. From where I had bled and didn't stop bleeding for months. I knew that feeling—it was back. "Do you want us to go get Kerry and Hunt? Coach?"

"No. Just—you two, can you stay right here?" I asked, pushing my thumbs into my eyes and wiping hard. I realized that my father hadn't made one comment about being strong, about being a man, questioning my character because I was crying so much. This was a weakness he could understand, the softness that we have for the women we love. How they can rip us open like knives. He took my hand and held it like my mother would, rubbing over my knuckles with his thumb and then bearing down tight.

"We'll be right here," he promised.

I looked down at my mother. "Tell me that I'm doing the right thing."

Her hand drifted to my shoulder and held me there. "You are doing the right thing."

"Okay," I nodded, and I took a deep breath and turned around, back into her room. Shellysarah the nurse caught my eye, and I nodded at her, too.

I walked through the door and untied my shoes. I set them in a little row under a chair and padded over to the bed, to the long line of white where she was waiting. But not for me. For something else that I could give her. There were so many tubes running into her body, I could barely make my way to her through the maze of things keeping her alive. The large, ridged tube that moved her lungs full and empty, But her heart—that was all her. That was working without any prodding. It was an illusion, it was, it was the thing I could put my hand on and snap at the doctors, _See? She's still here. Here's my proof._

And they would smile in a sad, shadowed way and try to explain to me why I was wrong. But it was my Mary Anne, and I loved her, and that made me _right_. I brushed off their words like an annoying rain and kept her here with me, measuring myself against that heart. It told me that I was right, that this was right. That she wanted to live, it did, she wanted to live, she did.

I listened to that heart above all things. I always had.

I put my hands on either side of her and pushed my way up onto the bed, lying on her right side. I tucked my head under the snaking lines of her monitors. They'd take all of these off so I could hold her, but not yet. For now, I had to be careful as I put my head against her neck, threaded my arms around her limp body. She was cold; where was the fire inside of her blood, where?

Where did you go, Mary Anne? Why can't I come with you?

Dr. Wilks walked in, that solemn face of his showing nothing and everything at once. "So, you're ready?" he asked.

"No," I sighed, "but it's time, isn't it?"

"It is," Dr. Wilks nodded. The room was filled with nurses, and I looked at him in a panic. I didn't want all of these people here. He waved a hand at me. _Wait_. "They're just unhooking her—they'll go, don't worry."

Better, better. The nurses worked around me, pulling off all of the small plastic plates on Mary Anne's head and her chest. Machine after machine went silent, their staccatos fading away. Even her heart monitor: it was pointless to measure it when it would be ending so soon.

All that was left in her body was the breathing tube, and all that was left in the room were she and I and her doctor. I could feel the eyes from people in the hallway, but I shut them out as if they were on the other side of the thick black lines that box off a basketball court. Outside of my world, my home. I slid over her, curling halfway over her body. I pulled up the blanket that she loved so much, the same color as my eyes, and tucked it around us. "How long will it take?" I asked, brushing the side of her face with the pads of my fingers.

"A few minutes," Dr. Wilks said. "I'm going to do it now, Logan, okay?"

Not okay. But I didn't say anything, which he took as a yes, leaning over and pressing the blue button on the ventilator tube and letting it fall away with a hiss, the sigh of a snake. He took a few steps back from the bed, leaving just me and her. Me and her and a want.

"I promised, no more talking," I whispered. "But I just wanted to say again, I love you. Okay? Okay," I said, wiping my eyes into her neck. I slipped my head down and rested it on her heart, nesting it on the ridged scars that crossed her chest. I watered her wounds as if my tears would make her grow back to me, rising up from her sleep like a tree. An undying tree, my Mary Anne. I held my ear to her chest and listened to the beating of her heart.

I curled a hand up around her face and pressed deeper against the thin barrier that kept me from that heart, her heart, my heart. I tipped my lips against her skin and then listened, what I loved to do—listen to her. I let everything else fall away into a spread of silence and bore down on that beating.

She was sound now, and I didn't want to miss the last beat.


	2. Chapter 1: Mary Anne

**First**

We had been awake for an hour, though neither of us had said a word. My back was against his chest, and I laid there, woven in his arms, staring at the alarm clock. It was nearly seven. It was nearly time. I looked at the mash of our fingers, the match of rings on those left hands. It had been less than forty-eight hours. The sharpness of the gold still startled me, the way that they glowed in the deep heart of the night.

I pressed the mix of our hands against my chest, against the slices of my scars, and I felt him shift closer to me, tighter against my skin. As if he could river into me if he just tried harder.

He sighed, and I kissed his hand, right there on his ring. And then I kissed my own finger, careful not to let the diamond scrape against my lips. He had covered me in things that shined: these rings, a necklace, earrings the color of the midday sun, all of the stars in my skin, all of his love. He had turned me into a constellation years ago, and now, I was studded in brightness.

Five more minutes. This was a luxury, just to lie here. To have a bed that belonged to _us_, a house that belonged to _us_, everything was steeped in him and me. We battled over the color of the sheets, which abused tables from Goodwill we should buy for the bed stands, where the dresser should go, all of these little decisions that we soaked in importance because it was all about _us_. This was our home, his and mine, and everything was important, right down to the kind of soap in the bathroom.

"We're being stupid," he said, peering at a glass bottle of soap that smelled like the sweet greens of lime and basil.

"Little things, my angel—little things knit together to become big things," I said, tapping him on the forehead with the hard bottom of that bottle, the puckered ridge of glass making a slight knocking noise against his bone.

Back before these rings came on our fingers. Back before they took a pearl-sized lump from my lung. Back before I spit up a mouthful of blood into the sink. The moment that started it all. This was a week before, when tables and soap and the stripes on sheets said so much about us and who we were together.

Then we remembered: it is the two of us, a sickness, and a want. It didn't matter how the soap smelled, what colors the spatulas were, if I slipcovered the battered couches. All we wanted was each other. And for me to get better.

Again.

We could have spent this time awake in bed doing something else—maybe talking. In three and a half years, we had never run out of things to say. Sometimes, the time would run away like a ribbon, winding down to its end before we were finished looping words at each other. He would fall asleep with his head on my stomach, or my fatigue-heavy hand would drop the phone on the floor, his voice still echoing out.

Maybe something else, a thing for beds and lovers. Though we had found that there were other places—college students have to be creative, with roommates and dorm rules and walls thinner than breath. The back seat of my car when we were desperate to touch each other. The dark shadows in gardens and parks, the empty locker room at his basketball arena—places with creativity and timing. But, mostly it was the unoriginal place: hotels. Our favorite, a place near the hospital with blankets blizzard-thick with soft cotton filling and stern, stiff mattresses, the contrast of that hard surface and the gentle cradle of the blankets and each other.

He would call and say a number. _252_. _110_. _376_. And I would grab a bag that was permanently packed and unzipped, waiting for more. For the next day's clothes, for a blue fleece blanket that I brought with me every time. So he could lay me down in the blue grass feel of it. When I would arrive to that numbered room, 252 or 110 or 376, he was sometimes huddled on the floor, working on his homework in the silence, and I would join him, matching his work with my own.

Sometimes, though, he'd be lying in the bed, his clothes stuttering the carpet. I would tear off what I was wearing and dive into him with a ferociousness that erupted from somewhere under my blood. Once, he was asleep just like that, just in his bare skin, and I took the flowers he had brought for me and ripped off the heads of the blooms, raining the petals all over him and that bed. When I slid on to him, he rolled me over, and the crush of us broke into the pieces of the flowers; the deep musk of the roses coated our bodies and lingered on my back, in my hair, for hours.

But this morning, no, it wasn't the time for speech or sex. It was for bearing witness to the last hour where my body would be _mine_, not shackled to the drugs that would try to blast my sickness away. Besides. He spoke best to me in silence; I could feel his eyes digging into me, boring a hole into my heart, and they were filling up all of the quiet. They were enough for me.

The alarm shrilled out as the numbers changed to seven o'clock. I broke my hand away from his and slapped the off button. Sighing, I rolled over to look at him.

"Good morning, Logan," I said.

"Good morning, Mary Anne," he replied, and we kissed as the minutes flipped by. "We should probably get up," he said, pulling away.

"We should," I grinned. "But it's so warm here. I don't wanna get up." He pushed his fingers into the soft place of my waist until I shrieked with laughter, bouncing away from him and off the bed, scrambling to my feet. "That was cheap!"

He shrugged. "I'm the master of cheap shots, you know that."

"Yeah, well, this isn't a game, and I'm not some shady…basketball-type guy," I finished with a lame flop of my hands.

"Wow. That was so specific," he winced. With a long stretch, the rope of his arms unwinding and filling up the whole width of the bed, he curled himself up and off of the mattress. "I showered last night, so you can go use up all the hot water if you want."

I shook my head, heading to the closet. "No, I'm good, too." I picked out a shirt with buttons, those shirts that were perfect for chemo treatment—easily taken off, easy access to the place that needed to be treated. This is what it was like to live in a world where treating cancer dictated everything, right down to what to wear. The hang of my catheter buckled the line of the buttons; it was so new that the skin around its mouth was still an angry red.

I peeked over my shoulder and caught him looking at me as he slipped on a t-shirt. What was he thinking? About how this was the beginning—or maybe the end, in a way. This was supposed to be the start of our trial, living together for the next year to see if it would be as good as we thought. As we had known it would be, from the small times we had lived together in the past—the weeks where he slept in my hospital rooms back during my first battle with cancer, the days we had strung together since. This was supposed to be a practice for when we made it official after we graduated.

But the cancer had changed that. It had ended all of that. I looked down at my left hand: it was no longer practice anymore, either.

What was he thinking? Something sad? But from the way his cheeks were fringing with red, I realized, no—something good. Something pillowed in a lust. My boy—he was a _boy_ all right.

"You think I'm hot?" I teased, sliding the last button into place.

"Stop it," he muttered, yanking out a pair of boxers and a fresh set of jeans. "We don't have time for that, and it's not fair."

I shuffled across the room, tiptoeing closer to him. "Not fair?"

"Stop it, Mary Anne," he repeated.

"Stop what?" I grinned. "I'm just walkin' here."

Logan turned away from me, and I slid my hands over his hips as he warned, "I swear to all that's holy, I will not be responsible for my actions if you keep this up."

I leaned my head into the valley of his spine, wrapping my hands over his stomach. "I just wanted to give you a hug. Today's gonna suck, I thought you needed a little love."

"Right," he snorted. "You were torturing me, don't play all innocent." His hand covered mine, and he squeezed tight. "Come on, we've gotta hustle if we're gonna get there on time."

I stepped back, letting him yank on his clothes. When he turned back to me, fastening the button on his fly, he was still shaking his head. I reached around him to grab a skirt out of the dresser—another piece of clothing with the cancer in mind. His finger hooked a pair of my panties, and he dangled them in the air in front of my face, letting them tick there in the air.

"I thought you said we had to hustle, and here you are, being all suggestive?" I scoffed, grabbing the underwear.

"I'm just making sure that you don't go flashing the doctors. That wouldn't be a very good way to kick off treatment—'Hi, cure me, please ignore the fact that I'm showing off my stuff,'" he replied.

"Hey, some doctors may appreciate that," I laughed. "I'm not above dirty tricks to get the best care."

"You didn't just cross the line there, pretty girl, you, like, spat on it, jumped on it, and then ripped the line to shreds." He took my hand and tugged me to my feet. In a swoop, he pulled me up and into his arms, basketing me in his grip. I giggled, curling my arms around his neck as he carried me down the steps. I was still his new bride, and there were thresholds everywhere.

"I could get used to this," I smiled as he stooped down to avoid bumping his head on the low ceiling on the stairway. "Logan as chariot."

"I do accept tips," he noted, kissing my forehead.

"How about…don't wear orange? It washes you out," I replied.

"Yeah, thanks, _Stacey_," he grumbled, setting me on my feet in the kitchen.

I dashed in front of the refrigerator. "Sit, sit. I'm in charge of breakfast. There will be no Trix cereal, got me? We're going for nutrition here."

"But Trix are for kids!" he whined, hopping onto the counter next to the oven.

"You are not a kid," I laughed. "You're a married man."

"I'm in college," he said, waving his hand dismissively at me. "I'm supposed to be delightfully immature until graduation."

I pulled out a carton of eggs and a block of cheese. "So…that means you eat food with a cartoon rabbit on the box."

"Damn straight," he nodded, fishing out an onion and a pepper from the basket behind him. He tossed them to me in a lazy underhand, and I sunk a knife into their fleshy bellies, the seeds of the green pepper lurching out of the cuts and slipping against my fingers. I shredded the cheese into a fine lace and piled it next to the heaped vegetables, turning to the stove where I placed a pan onto the burner. The gas jet leapt to life in a blue exhale, that stuffy, chemical smell of the fire hissing the pan into a thing of warmth.

I scraped at the eggs, the sound of them bubbling and the crisping of the vegetables creating a concert of noise over our quiet. When Logan cleared his throat, I nearly jumped. "I'm glad you're letting me come," he told me, tipping his head. "I'm glad you changed your mind."

Biting my lip, I admitted, "I didn't—I still think that this is going to be totally mundane. I'll be there for an hour, tops—I'm going to need you more this afternoon, when the side effects hit. They wanted you to come; when they called yesterday with the reminder checklist, they specifically asked that you be there."

He frowned. "More paperwork? What do they need from me? I mean, I'm not a bone marrow match for you, we already know that." His face slumped a bit, and I reached over and rubbed his thigh. How could be blame himself for that, that if I needed to rebuild my blood, we couldn't harvest it from him? Logan was my match in every way except inside the spongy mass of my bones—it wasn't his fault.

It was like that from birth.

It's not like we were meant to be from the moment we were conceived. We grew up and grew into each other. You can change yourself; you can't change your chemistry.

He took my hand and kissed the root of my forth finger, sliding his tongue against the sunrise bend of the wedding ring. The chaplain had him slide the engagement ring against it, saying, "To remind you of the promise you made to each other when he gave you this ring—your choice of each other."

I winked at my almost husband; the chaplain didn't know: I asked Logan to marry _me_. The ring came second. I asked him first.

I asked. He said yes. And then, before he had even touched me, even kissed me, he ran upstairs and came back with a small box, a thing of black the size of a lump of coal. "I've had this for awhile," he admitted, sitting back on the floor next to me.

"How long?" I asked.

"Since we got back together," he said.

I smiled, letting my legs slide into the crossing of his own. "We were never apart."

Shrugging, he replied, "I know. But that whole 'dating other people' thing—it was, just, stupid."

"Necessary," I smiled. "Tell me. Tell me the story."

He rolled his eyes. "_Tesorina_, no. Come on. It's embarrassing."

"No. I want you to tell it again. Your essay, read it to me." Logan pulled back from me and walked over to the office we had made in the small room to the left of the front door. He dug into the files in the cabinet, yanking out a manila folder. He trotted back to me, this time sitting behind me so that he was my wall, my thing to lean against. I cuddled back into him as he opened up the file and pulled out one of his freshman composition papers.

Logan leaned his head on my shoulder, letting the low sounds of his words murmur into my ear, under my skin. It felt like a wave, the tidal pull of his voice. The accent that had grown deeper and richer over the past two years, baking up under the heat of the South.

_On our first day of school, she and I met at a bookstore halfway between our towns, neutral ground. We shared a muffin in the café and browsed through shelves of books that called out to us. She would open up their crackling spines and move them like mouths, saying in a high, silly voice, _Buy me. Read me_. And I would roll my eyes at her and hold up books with somber looking people on the covers and say, _Someone needs a hug

_And she would take the hardcovers into her arms and squeeze them tight, giggling before settling them back where they belonged, waiting for the person who would take them home._

_It was the last day that I saw her—an entire month, we didn't see each other. We had both decided, we needed time to settle in at our colleges, in our new lives. Duke was her dream, North Carolina was mine, we needed to fall down into our places and find where we belonged. We belonged with each other—we were a forever thing. We had talked about getting married; we had even floated the idea of eloping on her eighteenth birthday, but no. No. That was the moment we decided we had to be sure. Our lives were more than each other; it's what made us so strong, that we could orbit out into other things and still come back. We shared a skin, her and me—it wasn't my life or her life, it was our life. We had to be sure that we were right._

_I spent a month without seeing her, diving into my new team, into my classes, into myself. I went out on a couple dates with girls who were wrong for me—I knew they were the first time they exhaled. It wasn't that they weren't Mary Anne, they weren't, it's that they were not _me_. Maybe there was a girl at my school who was right, maybe I just didn't find her, but I didn't care. I had found a right girl, and she was ten miles away._

_We talked every night, speaking so fast that our voices tangled up and tied together. "No, I want to hear about _you_," she'd laugh, and I could hear the sounds of her roommate chattering away in the background._

_"No," I'd protest. "You did that thing with the dorm council, right? Tell me about that."_

_And we'd talk until my own roommate would throw a shoe at my head and yell at me to _shut up for God's sake_, so she and I would move to our computers and shoot messages at each other until yawning made my eyes squint up in pain. We'd end each talk with so many I love yous, my fingers found the keys without thinking. _

_I went on dates, she went on dates. But it was a waste of time._

_On her birthday, we met at that bookstore again. Her car was already in the parking lot, and I pulled up beside it, picking up the mass of flowers I had bought for her, tied into a block with a blue ribbon that she could wear in her hair, the short cap of near black hair that had grown in so slowly over this past year. She was sitting in the café, flipping through a magazine; when she saw me, she jumped down the stairs and met me in the fiction aisle. I dropped the flowers on the ground and caught her as she flew into me. My feet arced in a circle as I swung her around, grinding the rose petals down into the carpet, releasing their sweet pinking scent into the air and into us._

_"I know what I want," she told me. "I know what I need."_

_"It's you," I replied, and she beamed at me. We kissed there in the fiction stacks until a bookseller snapped at us to buy a book and get a room._

"We did both," I giggled.

"It was a great book," he nodded, and I smacked his arm. "The next day, I went with Keshawn and picked this out. Well, I picked it out, and he put it on his pinkie and tried to convince the jeweler that _he_ was my, what did he call it—Chosen Life Partner or something. I told him to shut the fuck up before someone believed him."

I twisted back to look at his face, the gentleness that had settled in his lips and his eyes. "You were going to hold on this for four years?" I gaped.

"Yeah," he said. "I knew that you were my one, you know? But that I'd have to wait. I could wait for you."

"When would you have given this to me, if the cancer hadn't come back?" I asked.

His mouth twisted into a question mark. "I don't know—maybe Christmas, senior year? Or on your birthday that year. I kinda had a thought to do it after the NCAAs next year if, like, we won or something." He let out a little snicker. "The guys on the team wanted me to propose at a Duke-UNC game, but I said you'd die of embarrassment. I was right, yeah?"

"Oh, yeah," I snapped. "Bad idea, guys." I took the box and opened it, the wink of the diamond brightening in my eyes. It wasn't huge, it wasn't small—it was perfect, somewhere in the middle. What made it special was the filigree on the sides, the ivy of gold that snaked around like lace and held that stone in its hands. The snowing of the metal sparkled as much as the diamond—it looked like a thing of stars.

"Angel," I sighed. "It's perfect."

"It's you," he smiled, plucking it from its perch and pressing it up my finger to where it rested so well. "I'm so glad you asked me to marry you."

"I wish…I wish it hadn't been like this," I told him, curling that new ringed hand against his face.

He shrugged. "Yeah, but this is how it is. It's okay. Maybe it's better—I mean, I'm not the only married guy on the team, you know? And two other guys have fiancées. I'm not a freak this time," Logan beamed.

"_This_ time," I laughed, stroking his cheek. "There're still so many other opportunities." And he kissed my hand.

Like he was doing now, going over the line of the gold and then snaking down to the lines in my hands, mapping out the M of my life line, my love line, my fate line. Logan strung it all together and folded my fingers into a fist; he knocked that against his heart and then winked at me.

"Your eggs are going to burn, Rachael Ray," he noted, bending his head towards the stove.

I yelped, skipping a step back to the burner and desperately spooning the eggs around the pan. I tossed in the cheese and waited for it to bubble, the rising heat of it all browning the yellowing mass at the edges. I dumped the scrambled mix onto a large plate and then scooted up on the counter next to him, handing him a fork.

"So," I said, sticking my own fork in and ladling out a large bite. "We need to make sure that we get the house Dawn and Stacey-proofed."

He rolled his eyes. "There is still time to hook them up with an apartment. Like, _tesorina_, there's that great place just across the street. We could wave at them every morning—hi, guys!" he chirped. "Look at you, in your _own place_, not torturing Logan every day. Every. Damned. Day. For the whole summer."

"Oh, whatever," I sniffed. "If you can't handle their middle school teasing, then I should give Coach a call and tell him that you're a total wuss."

"Yeah, you know? There is a huge ass difference between 'You suck, Number 10, I hope you get hit by a bus' and 'Hey, Lee, let's pick on your clothes, life, and sexuality all day long because we don't have a hobby,'" he said, swinging his fork with each point.

I screwed up my mouth in thought. "I could teach Dawn to knit."

"Knit her and Stacey gags," he grumbled, stabbing the eggs. "Good-bye, nice quiet house."

"Hello, my sister? Who I really haven't spent any time with since we left for college?" I pointed out. "I have hung out with Kerry and Hunter, like, a hundred times more than Dawnie in two years, and come on, if they are totally on your case, I'll tell them to back off. They tease because they love," I grinned, rubbing his knees.

He leaned over and kissed me. "I love _you_, so I will deal. But I hope you understand what you are giving up." With a wicked curl on his mouth, his eyes edged down at the counter, then to the floor, and I felt my cheeks blush. That thing for lovers and beds—it had kind of happened here in the kitchen the night we moved in. Okay, so having my sister and her best friend live with us for the summer wouldn't be one hundred percent fantastic.

Almost, though.

"Well, the girls won't be here _all_ the time," I reasoned, biting my lips. "And they'll understand. We're still newlyweds, and this is our honeymoon—they will have to accommodate that."

"I told you—the very day you make remission, we're off to Italy," he stated. "We're not leaving the beach for a week. The end."

"I already have my bag packed," I told him. "Fourth of July."

"Six weeks. Perfect," he smiled. "Which is good. I mean, a vacay right away would have really fucked up my internship. So, the cancer is a good thing."

"Oh, sure, it was totally my plan all along to relapse," I nodded. "I penciled it right in—move into house, finish finals, cancer relapse, elope, the girls move in, Independence Day cookout…totally, totally planned."

"You are an organized lady," Logan agreed. "Well done."

"Thank you," I bowed. I sighed. "Tomorrow, the girls are getting in right around dinner, and that's when Dad and Sharon are due, too. My plan is, we'll make dinner—"

"We?" he mumbled, raising an eyebrow.

I rolled my eyes. "Okay, Mr. Cereal is Good Eatin', _I_ will make dinner, and you'll be my Food Bitch, is that fair?" He grinned. "So. Okay, I'll make dinner and a cake, and I'll light candles and stuff, and we'll say that we're celebrating—and hopefully the diamond will get all sparkly-like, and that's how we'll tell them," I rushed, tossing my fork into the sink.

He pulled the plate into his lap and frowned. "'Cause they won't notice it before?"

"Until dessert, no rings," I told him, and he gasped a little, clutching his hand to his heart with a wounded look. "Come on, angel, I don't want that to be the first thing that they say. Not the marriage, not the cancer—I want to say hello to everyone and, like, _be_ with them for a bit before we heap everything on them. You know my family—we're the freaking out type."

"I don't like lying," he sighed, still holding his hand against his chest.

"We're not lying," I protested. "We're concealing something. And not even for that long—like, maybe an hour or two. Logan, please. I just want that hour to be about me and my family, not me and my cancer. 'Cause you know that really, no one is going to be that surprised that we eloped."

"That's what Kerry said," he sighed. "Okay, all right. But," he added, pointing at me, "if somehow, someone says something about us, I might not be able to keep my mouth shut. I'm no good at secrets. I get surly."

"I know you do," I laughed. "You are so silly sometimes." He glanced at his watch, and I nodded, hopping off of the counter. I reached over to grab the plate and took a step towards the sink.

That's when it hit me, hammering right into my chest, into the flat land of scarred skin, the trenches of the war I faught against this illness three years ago. I had died. I had come back. But I had _died_. It didn't matter how good the prognosis was this time, it didn't matter how optimistic we all were, it didn't matter that I knew so much more that I could wrap the information around my hands like boxing gloves: I had cancer. It was back.

It was in me, tarring me up as I breathed and laughed and was just Mary Anne.

I had cancer. I always had cancer—it lives inside of bodies, just dormant, and you pray that it forgets how to wake up. But mine had roared back and volcanoed into the tissue between my missing breasts. Where it loved to live. It was creeping over my torso and bunking in my lungs. It was back, it was here, it was me.

The plate tumbled out of my fingers and crackled against the tile. I wanted to break with it, but I was grabbed before my bones could meet the floor, too. Logan swung me into his body, curling me into his cool skin and lifting me high up so that my face was on his shoulder, my feet creaking against his knees.

"I have cancer," I wept, nuzzling my wet eyes against his neck.

"I know," he whispered. "I know." His fingers dove into my hair, the near-black curls that had grown back after the chemo burned away my short chestnut bob. Would I lose my hair again? What would it come back like this time?

My hair, my nails, my mouth—all of these things so ruined. They came back. Dead nerves healed, my heart grew strong enough for me to start running again: look how I came back. I could do it again. I was an extraordinary thing when I wanted to be.

But I had cancer. For the moment, it was killing me to look it in the eye. All of the flippant courage dissolved, and I let myself be held.

I pressed my hands into Logan's back. "We better go," I sighed.

"Whatever, they're always running behind," he retorted, holding me fast against his body. "We'll go when you want to, not when you feel obligated."

I smiled into the hem of his collar and didn't move for a few minutes. I wrapped my legs around his waist and just burrowed myself deep. He had been so calm about all of this, calm from the moment I told him that the cancer was back, calm when I proposed, calm when I cried after our wedding, when I realized that I could make him a widower.

"What is wrong with you?" I demanded, shoving him as he sat there on our bed, just watching me. "How can you be all zen and stuff?"

"I have you," he told me, pulling me close. "All of this crap, we can deal with it because it's you and me, pretty girl. I have you: the rest will fall into place."

"You might lose me," I shot back.

"You leave me, I'm diving right after you and wrenching you back, Mary Anne," Logan replied, narrowing his eyes. "No dying."

I started saying that now: "No dying, no dying, no dying." He rocked me back and forth to the rhythm of my promise. "No dying, no dying, no dying."

"No dying," he agreed.

"I want to be Mary Anne for so much longer," I whispered. "I just want to live my life." He stood there, holding me like the limb of his tree-like body, as the kitchen warmed over in the gold shades of the rising sun, until the two of us glowed, shining hard like we were light, too.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

We stood in front of the glass doors of Duke Hospital, pausing there in the middle of the black mat. The doors hissed open and shut, hitting together with a dull smack and then rocketing open like a mouth. Logan put his hands on my face and breathed hard into the space between us. I gripped his arms, squeezing tight into the veins that charged from his perfect hands up to his heart. His heart, my heart.

"No matter what happens from here on out, it's you and me," he promised. "You're gonna do this, and I'm gonna be there."

"I'm going to beat this," I said. "No dying."

He kept looking at me, through my eyes and into the place where I was tucking all of my doubt, all of my insecurities, and I could feel a ringing in there, the way that bells shake when they are booming all over a town. With the lightness of wings, he put his lips on mine, and I kissed him as the doors kept opening, closing, and then opening over and over again.

"Come on, angel," I sighed, putting my arm around his waist. "It's time." When we walked over the threshold, I had an odd feeling that he should carry me, the way a bride should be held as she enters her home. But we walked through, me on my own feet, holding tight against him.

When we got to the oncology wing, there were clipboards waiting. I frowned. "We filled all of these out—right?" I asked, looking at Logan.

"We filled out so many forms, they all kinda look the same," he shrugged, glancing down at the papers.

The nurse smiled at me. "It's just a bit more medical information, that's all. Oh, and Mary Anne, they have you as _Bruno_ in their system," the nurse noted, tapping a finger on the file that said _Spier_. "Do you want me to change that?"

I elbowed Logan. "Yes, please."

"She hates my name," he confided. "Ignore the sob story about being the last person in the Spier family. She's a liar."

The nurse rolled her eyes at us. "Just review the information for me, please."

I sat down and checked over the forms. My medical history in its entirety. The cancer from before, the changes in my body after, the medicines, the treatments, the pains. All of it was here. I hadn't missed a thing—how could I, it was still drilled in me.

There were two new forms, one focused on my cardiac system, the other a gynecological paper. I opened up my day planner with a sigh and started filling in the dates. Heart attack on February 25, 2006, and cardiac arrest on Febrary 26, 2006. Ecocardiagrams yearly on…March 20th, March 21st, and March 30th. Yearly EKGs. No to pacemakers. No to stents in the arteries. I yanked out the small card stuffed in a pocket in the day planner cover and grabbed the GYN form. Last period, January 15th, 2006. Yes, I have had Cytoxan. Yes, I have had Tamoxifen. Yes, I am in menopause. Yes, I have had spotting within the last year: October 13th and March 15th, to be exact.

Yes, I am sexually active. No, I do not have any STDs. I sighed; there was no connection between my cancer and the HPV virus. We already knew that. These forms were boring.

I stood up and gave them back to the nurse with a shrug; when I sat back down next to Logan, he didn't look up from his book. "Are you still nervous?" I teased, touching its pages, a manual for cleaning teeth.

"Uh, yeah?" he said. _Duh_. "Though at least I have, like, a friend for my first patient. That's something," he said, biting his lip. "I just need to convince Coach D not to tattle on me if I, like, puncture his gums or something."

"I think the blood gushing out of his mouth would kinda belie that one, angel," I grinned.

Glaring at me, he shifted away and bent farther over his text. "You could be supportive and come to the clinic and let me clean _your_ teeth on Monday, too."

"You practiced on me last week!" I protested.

"Yeah, but that didn't count towards my internship hours," he whined, shutting the book around his finger. "And, and, I could use the little polisher on your teeth. Isn't that thing great? It just," he balled his hand into a fist and beamed, "just really makes everything clean."

I blinked. "Sometimes, I forget how OCD you can be."

"Shut up," he snapped.

"At least you're a lot cleaner around the house," I shrugged.

"I always feel like the dorm monitor from my old boarding school is gonna come in and give me detention if there are clothes on the floor," he said with a shudder. "Haven't you ever noticed that I keep the bedroom door open? It's because we weren't allowed to have girls in our rooms unless the door was open. It's still, like, a habit."

"You know, I have noticed that!" I laughed. "We'll have to make sure that it is _shut_ when the girls come."

"And locked," he added, nodding fiercely. I put my arm around his back and leaned into his arm, watching him trace his finger over the Universal Numbering System for the hundredth time. As if he hadn't been saying out things like, "Is it 15 that's hurting?" for years when I complained of a toothache.

Dentist's kids. They are always a little odd. I looked at him and then down at myself. Our poor kids—they were going to be neurotic, the children of a dentist and a psychologist. They would probably rebel by getting gingivitis and being completely, absolutely well-adjusted. How horrible. They were going to wish a different couple adopted them.

I reached down into my bag, my fingers brushing over the folded triangle of Barbara's flag, its Star of David shining in the light, making the clear blue of it turn slightly green, a strange snaking of its color. I tugged out my teddy bear, J.B., and held him tight. I had a boy to hold, yes, but J.B. was my partner in all of this. I could rip on him, and he would take it, my fists in his stomach, my hands wrenching at his arms. Unlike the fleshed out support I had in Logan, J.B. couldn't bleed when I ripped my fingers on his body. Unlike Logan, J.B. felt no pain. I curled around Logan and the bear and sighed. Waiting, waiting, I was always waiting with this disease.

"Spier?" a nurse called out, opening the door to the exam areas. I stood up and waited for Logan to take my hand before following her inside. Before we went into an exam room, she had me step on the scale in the hallway. I gave Logan a huge smile as I stepped up on the bouncing platform of the scale and raised my hands above my head in triumph, like a victorious boxer, as the nurse put the large stone weight on 100 and then slid the balance up to the number twelve.

"Fantastic," he gushed, giving me a high five. "I thought you had gained some weight."

"This might be the first time in the history of the world that I have seen a girl not flip when her guy says that," the nurse laughed.

I giggled as she took my height. "Oh, you don't understand," I told her. "This is what I used to weigh before…well, before I got sick the first time."

"It just took three years. Freshmen fifteen my ass," he muttered. "More like freshmen _two_."

"I just let you carry the load for me," I shrugged, and he slung his arm around my neck; I squeezed the hardness there, the stony feel of his forearm. That's where his freshman fifteen had gone, there and in the new rise of power in his back. He was maturing into his body, making it into a weapon, something he could wield with a fierceness on the basketball court, and it was almost odd to feel it changing under my hands. We both were growing so strong as we grew up—just different kinds of strength.

My doctor, Dr. Wilks, was standing by an exam door, smiling at us. "Congrats, you two," he said, giving me a hug. "Why wasn't I invited?"

"You, my coaches, my team, her research team, our friends, _families_," Logan told him, shaking his hand. "Everyone hates us, just join the club."

"We just wanted to get it done before this started," I apologized, following him into the exam room. "After graduation, we'll, like, have a huge thing, I promise, and you can come. And sit on my side of the church," I ordered with a nod.

"Oh, that was never a question," he winked. He sat down on a stool, opening my thick file on the small table jutting out of the wall. That was me, a history, stretching back years. I sat down next to my husband—husband, husband, wow, he was my _husband_—and watched him click his pen to life as he looked over my forms. Dr. Wilks had been my doctor ever since I got to Duke, and I had learned two things about him—first, he had an incredible poker face. I could never tell if the news was good or bad just by looking at him. On the other hand, the other thing I knew about him—and loved—was that he never prolonged my wait. He liked to get started, get things _done_, and get to action.

We got along well, him and me.

"So, okay, give me my pump, gimme some drugs, and let's get going," I announced. "I had a bad moment about an hour ago just thinking about the cancer, so I'm ready to kick some ass here."

Dr. Wilks scratched his nose. "Oh, Mary Anne," he sighed, spinning around to face me. "It's not that simple."

"What do you mean?" Logan asked, taking my hand. "You said that today would be so routine, it would put us to sleep. She wasn't even going to let me come—in fact, why am I here? I mean, duh, but, this wasn't supposed to be a big deal."

I dug my hand in his and clutched harder on J.B. "What's going on? Is it my heart?"

"Well, that's a concern," he said, folding his fingers into a steeple. "Mary Anne, when was the last time you saw a gynecologist?"

"Like, in the fall, when I had some spotting," I said. "I thought maybe my period was coming back, but she said that it was normal, that I was still menopausal. Why?"

I glanced at Logan. The questions about STDs. No. He'd _never_ cheat on me, no way. He was the one who craved relationships, stability, he was the one who was the romantic, the mushball who was always planning little things for us. Senior year, I had to beat it into him that love wasn't just a _doing_ thing, it was as simple as holding hands, meeting eyes in a room where we were talking to other people, saying _I love you_ because it felt right on our tongues. There wasn't a perfect night or a perfect date or a perfect anything. Love was made of little things that strung together into a big thing.

Not that I didn't love flowers all the time. I had kind of gotten used to that, to the floral smell of his thoughts about me. When I thought of his scent, it was the rubber of his hands, the ginger of his shampoo, the mint on his breath, and a country of flowers that bloomed from somewhere under his skin. His love for me was deeper than all roses.

No. He would _never _cheat on me. He wouldn't…no.

No. But the cancer spreads. I have Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, I have a deformed BRCA-2 gene. That means my cancer loves to find the parts that are special to women, to live in breasts and ovaries and wombs.

"Oh, my God," I choked. "It spread, didn't it. It spread, I have ovarian cancer or uterine cancer, don't I. Oh, my God." It's not like those parts of me had worked in years, but still. The idea of losing that…losing another part of me like that…they'd chop all of that out, wouldn't they. They'd take it out and garbage more parts of me.

"No, Mary Anne," Dr. Wilks said. "Actually, that would almost be preferable. We could still start your treatments today if that's what it was."

Logan frowned, shifting his arm tight around me. "I don't get it."

"We can't start chemo today," Dr. Wilks stated. "We can't do anything today, Mary Anne."

"Why not?" I breathed.

He stared at Logan and then at me. "You're pregnant."


	3. Chapter 2

The words hung there in the air: _you're pregnant_. They glittered fierce and threatening and dissolved into my skin. I stared at my arms, expecting them to erupt up with the truth, for me to look different and changed. I let my hands slip away from my bear, and they drifted to my stomach. There was something there? There was something there.

No. "No," I said, shaking my head. "You're wrong. I can't get pregnant. I'm—I haven't had a period in years, I _can't_ get pregnant." I looked from Dr. Wilks to Logan and began waving my finger between the two of them. "This is a joke, right? This is why you asked Logan to come, right, so you two could play a trick on me. You're always doing this," I gasped, elbowing my husband hard in the ribs, where my ribs had once crackled open over my heart. "You always try to get me going—like about Keshawn and Todd and the goat? This is like that, right? Okay, this is _not_ funny, understand?"

But he wasn't looking at me. His mouth was this gaping block of disbelief, and the fingers of his left hand had gone limp on my shoulder. He looked like he had been slapped. No. Like he had been shot.

"This isn't a joke," Dr. Wilks sighed. "You are really, truly pregnant. It came up in your blood work yesterday; we run a pregnancy test on every woman of childbearing age before we begin chemo. And…it came back positive." He leaned his elbows on his knees and added, "We have to make some decisions, Mary Anne, and none of them are going to be easy."

"I'm pregnant," I mumbled, "I'm really pregnant. You swear."

"I swear," Dr. Wilks said. He reached back to my file and pulled out a piece of tissue-thin paper; he held the lab report to me, and I grabbed it, running my eyes down the list of tests. Normal liver function, normal kidney function, normal lipid count, _pregnant_, negative for diabetes…

Logan leaned his head on top of mine, wrapping his right arm across my chest. He was holding me, but I knew it was more for him. He was slumping right down onto the structure of his body, and it wasn't enough. I could feel blame rising up from his blood like a humidity. "How can she be pregnant and have cancer, too?" he asked, clutching his fingers deep into my skin.

"They aren't mutually exclusive," Dr. Wilks explained. "In fact, lymphoma is a disease for young adults, so it isn't uncommon for female patients to be pregnant when they are diagnosed."

"But—what do I do?" I whispered. "I can't get treatment? You said that Hodgkin's lymphoma had a really high survival rate, you did, especially when you catch it early. So…what happens? Do I—do I have to get an abortion?" I asked, wrenching my eyes shut as Logan gripped harder to me.

Dr. Wilks reached over and touched my knee; I opened my eyes to look at him. There was something steadying in his dark eyes, a horizon line that I leveled myself against. That poker face of his—nothing registered there. It was comforting, those blank circles. I stared at him as he told me, "Mary Anne, we're not going to get that far ahead of ourselves, okay? First, we don't know how far along you are. You're not showing, so you're probably still in your first trimester, but you need to be seen by a gynecologist for a physical examination to be sure. Once we have that information, then we can proceed. After the twelfth week, we can begin chemo and radiation just like normal, so it's critical that we know."

"Yeah, but it doesn't mean that she _shouldn't _terminate the pregnancy," Logan replied in a dull voice.

Shrugging, Dr. Wilks said, "That's true. If she is in her first month, the idea of delaying treatment for eight weeks could be dire for Mary Anne's chances of making remission. I won't deny that."

"I might have to choose between my baby and me," I realized, and I pressed hard against my stomach, trying to read my own flesh like Braille. What was in there? What did it mean? Tell me the answers, tell me what to do with you. "How did this happen?" I murmured.

"Mary Anne, there was always an outside chance that you could regain function of your reproductive organs—it's why the doctors at Yale chose to induce menopause. Your body took three years to heal itself. Recovery time for spinal injuries can take five years, brain injuries can take a decade. We can't clock how our bodies come back. I'm sorry if you were misled about your menopause: they did tell you that you _might_ regain function, right?"

"Did they?" I asked Logan, but he was silent, so heavy around me, a leaden body that had cast itself on mine. "I can't remember. All I remember is, my GYN senior year said that my ovaries were probably so damaged, I'd never be able to get a baby to term because—the eggs, they would be—oh, God, Dr. Wilks, what if the baby is sick?" I gasped, clapping my hands over my mouth. "Like, birth defects from all of my treatments? Or has Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, too—or if it was a girl, the BRCA mutation? What if the baby—"

"Isn't right," Logan mumbled. "It comes from my side, too." I put a hand on his neck and pulled myself around so that I could hold him. The bitter scent of blame, it was coiling out of his clothes and hitting me in an obsequious way, begging me for absolution. So I stroked his face, the near-bare curves of his head, and looked into his eyes for the first time. They looked so hollow, like those words, that _you're pregnant_ had shoveled right into him and yanked out all of his confidence and strength and faith.

He didn't see me. He was seeing his mother. All of the babies she could never bring to birth.

"Angel," I whispered, kissing his cheek. "It's okay."

He blinked. "I'm so sorry, Mary Anne. I can't believe I did this to you."

"Stop it," I snapped, grabbing his face and giving it a shake before I kissed him. "There is no way either of us could have known about this."

"Really, Logan, there is no way that you two would have known," Dr. Wilks assured him. "I could just slap whomever led you to believe that her body couldn't heal. It was a good assumption, but because it was possible, you should have been on a Norplant device from the moment you made remission three years ago. But, your GYN _was_ right—there is no guarantee that this fetus will make it to viability. A quarter of all pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage, Mary Anne, and you are still slightly underweight—in fact, you being your current weight is probably due to the pregnancy. Your body isn't exactly the healthiest home for a developing baby," he said, his mouth drooping.

"So, what do we do?" Logan asked.

Dr. Wilks reached into his pocket and pulled out an appointment card. "I called over to Student Health and got you an appointment with an OB on Monday morning."

"Is that too late?" Logan pressed. "Shouldn't we move faster? I mean, what about later today, we can try today, right?"

"It's okay," the doctor said, handing me the card. "A few days will not make any difference. Honestly. Take the rest of today, take the weekend. You need to think things over. There are a lot of possibilities—what if Mary Anne is in her first four weeks versus being, oh, ten weeks along. What if the fetus is healthy versus not. Do you want to wait for the fetus to reach the point where you can do genetic testing, see if it has severe birth defects. I want you to come back on Wednesday with some decisions, okay, so figure things out between the two of you and then with the OB, and then we'll move from there."

Dr. Wilks steepled his fingers together and looked down at the ground. "Mary Anne, Logan, this isn't necessarily bad news."

"Are you kidding?" I squeaked.

"No, I'm not. I know you don't have any blood siblings—so, if this baby _is_ healthy and you decide to proceed with the pregnancy and if it can make it to term, we could consider a stem cell transplant or a bone marrow transplant from your baby." He pressed his fingers against his lips and said, "It could be a way to maybe stop the cancer from coming back."

"Like a cure?" Logan asked, leaning forward.

"Possibly. It could decrease the chance of Mary Anne's propensity to create malignancies—if her blood and bone marrow are healthy, then that's a great building block. There is still a chance for graft-versus-host complications, but again, we shouldn't get too far ahead of ourselves. It's a possibility, and it's something that you two should consider in your plans," Dr. Wilks explained.

I looked at him. "What do you think?"

"I think we need to know how far along the pregnancy is. If you are past eight weeks, well, my advice would be to hold off on terminating the pregnancy—I think we can make it a month without significant metastasizing of the cancer. We can monitor the cancer and if it seems to be progressing at a rate that I find to be dangerous, nothing stops us from ending the pregnancy at that time and beginning treatment. But, I think we should get to the point where we can test the fetus for birth defects and to see if it has an intact chromosome 17," he answered, shifting his gaze between us.

"That's the—where the Li-Fraumeni gene is, right?" Logan asked, wrapping his fingers in my hair and kneading my scalp. My hair: I was so concerned about losing my hair again, it seemed like the worst thing I could lose.

I could lose my life. And now I could lose the life of this…baby? Was it a baby already? Was it wrong to think like that?

Dr. Wilks nodded. "Go home. Come back Wednesday at eight in the morning again, and we'll talk about what decisions the two of you have made and go from there."

The two of us. This is no longer just my sickness, is it. This is us now.

This is his baby. If it is a baby?

My doctor stood up and urged me to my feet. He wrapped his thin arms around me and rubbed my shoulders as he held me against his body. The wire of him snug into me, tugging me back up from the deep. It was so odd to be held by him, this man who was a calm thing, all slick surface and distance. I hadn't noticed how young he really was, probably no older than forty, the lines around his eyes still shallow hints. His hand rubbed over my back as if he was trying to warm me after a long time in the cold. I wanted him to tell me what to do, this man who knew more than me.

Though, no one knows more about me than myself. Except Logan.

And this was going to have to be _our_ decision. More important than soap or sheets or tables. Getting married, getting treatment: these were things we did without thinking. We had been married for less than two days, and this was our first decision.

Way to start off with a bang.

I took his hand and held it close with my own as we left the exam room and walked down the hall and out into the elevator lobby. Our fingers were threaded so tight, my hand was turning numb, but I gripped my other hand around this clasp of us. We hadn't looked at each other yet. Not yet, not yet. If I saw him, looked into the sweet sky of his eyes, I might not be able to stand. And I didn't know if he would be able to pick me up again.

When we got into the elevator, he pulled me against him. My ear rested against his chest, hearing the panicked flutter of his heart. I looked up at him, which was a mistake. Because I saw his eyes, a water-colored version of my own, just suffocating with all of this. They were stunned and sick and reeling, terrified, mortified, lost. But there, under it all, was this little lick that was making him feel as confused and dirty as I was.

Somewhere, there was a little smudge of happiness: we had made a baby.

And that happiness burned like the acidic stain of shame.

Looking at him was a mistake; my knees buckled, and I swooped down to the floor. He caught me before my head hit the ground, grabbing the ball of it in the soft pockets of his palms. Logan sat down on the floor of the elevator with me, pulling me into his lap, and I tied my arms around his neck. I cried into his shoulder, he cried into my neck, awful crying, the sobbing that comes from a place that never seems to run dry. You cry and cry, and there is always something there. I used to think this place in me was shaped like my mother, but it has taken on the form of a lump, of a stopped heart, of a bald head and a bleeding mouth.

And now a baby.

The doors to the elevator opened on a lower floor, and a doctor stepped on. "Are you two okay?"

"No," I sniffed, balling closer against my husband. Husband, husband. This was my husband. This was the father of my child. If it was a child. Was it?

"Can I help you?" the doctor asked, squatting down next to us.

Logan twisted his face from my neck. "Can you make her better?" he pled, running his hand up my spine and parking his fingers in the rough of my hair.

"I'm sorry," the doctor murmured, touching my knee. His hand lingered there for a moment too long before he stood up and focused his eyes away from us. He was giving us time, wasn't he, shifting his gaze somewhere else, handing us the few moments that we all shared in this space and saying, _It belongs to you_.

So I let myself dissolve back into my sobs, clenching harder at Logan as he clung to me. Our tears sounded like rain, the way a storm comes in and beats down on roofs with a steadiness, a furious pace, something that can be measured and appreciated. Something that would end.

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It was the one thing we said: _no talking about this_. Not for a while. Logan always needed time to process things in a sink of silence, and I didn't want the words to roll over my tongue. _I'm pregnant_. The pressure of them in my mouth was making me gag, so I kept them back, so far back, hidden under my heart. Near my stomach. Where it was.

We didn't talk in the car. He handed me the keys without a word, waiting for me to reach over and unlatch the passenger's side door of his car. Our seatbelts clicked in unison, and he slumped over into my lap. Once I had us on the road home, I curled my hand around his face, and he kissed my wrist, the soft of his lips stringing the veins there like a violin's bow.

We didn't talk at home. The moment the door shut, I stormed upstairs, racing to the full-length mirror in our bedroom. I stared at myself—I looked the exact same as I had been two hours before. Not pregnant. Not even a whisper of that, just a fullness in my body that I hadn't seen in three years. I put my hands on my blouse and unbuttoned it, letting the cotton of my shirt wing down to the floor at my feet. I unzipped my skirt and let it fall away, too. Logan appeared in the doorway, and I gestured him over to me. My fingers brushed the line of my underwear, straddling where _it_ was. I couldn't do it—I was too scared to touch my bare skin there. So he put his fingers on the lace band of my panties and pulled them down, down past my knees and my ankles.

This was my body, and it no longer belonged to just me. My legs rumbled, and I opened my arms to him, and he lifted me up.

After he laid me on the bed, he took off his shirt and pants and boxers, heaping them on the floor to slide under the blankets with me. He put his hands on my stomach, framing that small circle where the almost-maybe-baby was. Logan kissed me there, spiraling in from his hands to a place right under my belly button, before tipping his ear against my skin.

I wanted to ask him if he heard anything, felt something that I didn't, but I couldn't. My mouth was an ashed thing, lumped like piles of autumn leaves. And from the look on his face, the crumple of his eyes and his mouth, I knew he couldn't. There was nothing that would have told us, no hint, no sign. This was not supposed to happen: this wasn't _ever_ supposed to happen.

How many times had he told me, _I'm fine with adoption, pretty girl. It's almost a relief_. That fear, of babies born broken, it always surfaced in his eyes. From his side of the family. What would his mother think—me pregnant. Me, maybe having an abortion. She once had one, too, because her baby had been so sick, it wouldn't have lived. And it shredded her right down, it had drove her insane, it had made her suicidal and empty because she glanced in mirrors and saw a murderer looking back. If I did that, would it happen to me, too? Would I stumble down and lose myself like she had, the guilt and the power of the shame eating right at everything that I was?

I felt the pressure of Logan's hands on my body, and I forced myself to believe, _No_. But then again, he had tried to stop his mother from feeling that way and failed. I had seen his mother and father together, the way that Lyman would tug a lock of his wife's hair and wrap it around his finger while looking at her as though she was some amazing gift that he had received for no good reason. A _tesorina_, a little treasure. The way that Logan loved me. If Lyman couldn't stop his own wife from feeling like that, how could my husband do the same for me?

If I chose to do that. Because this baby could be my salvation. My match baby, maybe.

Would it have my blood, the best of my blood, but his eyes? Or maybe his hands? His hair, the way that it browned in the winter and lightened into a yellow sand shade once he spent a few days out in the sun? His soft lips, my long eyelashes, short like me or tall like him?

Did it matter as long as the baby was _my cure_?

The air rosed over with the scent of oranges, of the snowed dusting of baby powder and pencil shavings: the smell of my long-dead mother. A woman who got married and had a baby so quickly, so quickly that she and her husband barely had time alone together. A baby that she adored. A baby that she wanted. But not as bad as I wanted a baby: I had grown up without a mother, and it was all I wanted. No—I wanted a mother every day, and it made _me_ want to be a mother, the need of it building in me like steam.

I could be.

If I could only live.

I ran my knuckles down Logan's face, wiping away the wet layers on his cheeks. He was still crying, I could tell, from the way that his breath kept tripping over itself, from the wetness on my skin. I was doing this to him. One of the things I loved about him was how he wasn't ashamed to cry—but he didn't, not that much. Neither did I, really. I used to be a crybaby, but I learned that you should save your water for better things. That seeing your friends fight, that a sad commercial, that the idea of sadness just on its own, these were things that were wastes. There were better things to cry about, I thought, wiping my own eyes against the pillow, there were.

He put his hands against my head and lifted his body up so that our faces met. When we lay down, we could look eye to eye; I usually had to stand on a box or on a stool to be able to be his height, nearly a foot taller than my own. My friends thought it was so cute, how we were so strange in scale to each other. But it could be aggravating, the way that I could never just kiss him. I could never just lean my head on his shoulder when we were walking. But we had made signals. My finger pressing into his shoulder blade meant, _bend to me_. That pressure on the place that looked like a wing, fly down, fly down so I can feel my mouth on yours.

I could kiss him right now, though, and I did, waving into him with a hunger. Make this okay, Logan, make this okay. Forgive me for doing this to you—the cancer, this…_this_. His tongue slipped over mine and mapped each inch of my mouth, and I felt his thumbs on my temples, circling there, keeping me so close.

_I'm sorry_, I wrote into the bare skin of his shoulder.

_I love you, I love you, I love you_, he scrawled across the scars that ran under my heart.

_Baby_, I said back.

_Ours_, he replied. _You and me_.

_You and me_. My finger kept circling that into him as he rolled us onto my back, him laying on me like I was a bed. Drooping over me like a balloon robbed of air, he covered my body, the cool of him driving out the fire that had built in every inch of my skin. I was burning with this, the cancer and all of these decisions. Keep the baby, and it was sick. End the pregnancy and lose my chance at a cure. Keep the baby and get sicker. End the pregnancy and die anyway.

What do we do?

What should we do? I loved knowing things, unpacking everything that can be learned and reconstructing them into something that made sense. It's why I loved psychology, the science of the mystery of our minds. Making order out of the crazed ways that we look at the world. But here, there was no way to know there, was there. There was no way to be right. There was no secret, no truth, no answers.

It was just me and him, a sickness, and a want. But wanting what? Each other. For me to get well. For us to have a family, to be a family. But how do we do that?

I wanted someone to tell me.

I kissed his neck and urged him up. As he sat, I looked at the scar that looped over his shoulder, after all of these months finally fading back into a shiny pink line. When I pulled him up and out of the bed, I looked at the nasty line on the front of his right thigh, the odd pucker that looked like the wounds of arrows on the back of his left thigh. He was an athlete, he was covered in wounds. Where would this, all of _this_ go on him? In his heart—my heart, too. He hurt, I hurt. I kissed him there, on the smooth plank of skin over that place, and then walked to the closet.

I tossed him his running sneakers and pulled out my own shoes. I dashed to the dresser and yanked out some of our workout clothes, pairs of shorts and battered shirts. He raised his eyebrows at me, but I swung my hand at him in an encouraging way. He shrugged, pulling on the clothes and lacing up his sneakers as I mimicked him.

This was how I deal with things: I run through them.

My husband followed me to the front door and to the sidewalk. When I broke into a run, he came up beside me, almost lazy in how slow he was to be at my pace. But he was a sprinter; he would appreciate this when we were in our third mile. I was built for distance, for the long runs, a measured energy that pumped out of my legs. Once, I had been horrified at the idea of activity—now, I craved movement.

I loved moving forward, always, always. The physical act of charging ahead gave me a confidence, a calmness. If I could put one step in front of the other here, I could do it anywhere. Pumping my arms to propel me forward, I hurtled us down our small street and onto Franklin Avenue, heading towards the grounds of his university.

We sliced down Franklin, passing by the shops and restaurants, where he had taken me on dates, where we had sat with his teammates and laughed ourselves hoarse. The coffeeshop where I ordered tall cups of the hot, earthy liquid and slipped in cream and butterscotch candies and worked on my homework with him for hours on Sundays, my roommate sprawled out on the table next to us. All of these places that mean so much to us. We were running right by them all.

I turned left onto Columbia, arcing down the border of the campus, turning left again so we could reach the heart of the University of North Carolina, passing by the red bricked building that glowed the color of autumn leaves in the mid-May sunlight. Students shuffled by, still bleary from finals week; some heads turned and stared at Logan, but we were moving too quick for them to register _Is that the point guard?_ and connect it to him. I loved running with him and his old roommate, the team's center, a massive hulk of a man who loped and heaved his way along. Keshawn loved being seen, he loved being noticed; he waved and shot his fingers in exuberant points as student called out hello.

"We're here to _run_, not show off," Logan would snap.

"Speak for yourself," Keshawn would snort, turning backwards so that he could stare at the retreating body of some beautiful girl.

We were here not to run today, we were here to run this _off_. Would I be able to run soon? When the chemo beat me down into exhaustion, if this baby kept growing in me. Baby, baby, I was _pregnant_. My feet caught on the curb, and I nearly stumbled, but I kept charging forward, forward. The pound of my rubber soles on the pavement was like a lullaby, and I cradled down into the rhythm of this movement.

We turned onto Raleigh Street, and I could hear Logan's breath thicken, the huff of exertion as we ticked into our third mile while we crossed through the Arboretum. In the midst of all of the trees, the butter spread of daffodils, the thick air of our Southern home congealed in my lungs and stuck there. I exhaled hard through my nose, the fiery feel of that air making me go faster. I was warming up—I was heat. I was power.

When we emerged from the gardens, I let him lead—this was his school, and he knew best how to get where I wanted to go. Lacing between buildings and trees, we fed our fast bodies through the yards and curved into McCorkle Place, where the landmarks lived. The places that powered this university.

I watched his heels slam against the asphalt as we diagonaled down. He slowed, swinging his arms in a heavy way as we stopped in front of a small domed gazebo, the white ribbed columns holding up the rise of the faded blue ceiling. I shuffled up to the fountain and let the water of the Old Well run over my fingers. Drinking this water was supposed to bring you good luck, it was. I took a large gulp and then wet my fingers again, running those damp tips under my shirt, over the center of my chest. I looked over at Logan, and he bit his lips, looking down at my stomach.

I touched there, too.

After he leaned down and took a long drink, I took his hand, and we walked back towards Franklin Avenue, to my favorite place at this school that my school despised. A girl from Duke in love with a boy from UNC. If it wasn't for sports, this wouldn't be disgusting.

Stupid sports. They ruin everything. Competition—it wasn't much my thing.

Though I knew how to fight and win.

The large tree emerged in front of us, this worn, washed out thing that looked battered and stripped, its trunk the color of grayed skies under a blanket of green leaves. It had been assaulted and challenged for four centuries, but this tree had survived.

"If the Davie Poplar falls, UNC falls," I murmured as we approached it.

"It's never coming down," Logan declared. "All of us, we'll hold it up if we have to. We're never gonna let it come down."

"I am a tree," I breathed, kneeling on the stone bench at its base. I stared around us. This is where we had been married on Wednesday, that quick ceremony that his basketball team's chaplain officiated during lunch. My old roommate Erin wore that pretty purple dress of hers, Keshawn put on a suit, so short that his ankles poked out of the ends of his slacks.

"Sorry," he shrugged, glaring at us. "If I had, say, more than twenty-four hours notice, I woudda had my mom send me my good suit. You know. Just saying."

But we had to move fast. I wanted to be his wife just in case. Just in case something went wrong when I stepped into the hospital for my first treatment. Just in case they prognosis was darker, stickier and deadlier than we had thought.

We were right to get married. Just in case had happened today.

Erin had brought her camera, fiddling with the aperture as she screwed it into place on the tripod. "I would like to thank Professor Rossi for my considerable photography skills and remind you all, Photo 101 was not the bunny course that I had hoped it would be."

"Oh, right, like your photo class was as tough as astrophysics or whatever it was you were reading for fun during Mary Anne's biopsy," Logan laughed, looping his newly ringed hand with mine.

"It was tough sledding. Creativity is anathematic to my existence," she shuddered.

Keshawn glared at her. "Do you always show off how smart you are, or is it just around me?"

"Just around you, sweetheart. I'm hoping to seduce you with my mind," she grinned. Maybe that was true. I could never get a straight answer out of her on it, about how she felt for Logan's best friend. Keshawn stared at her in bewilderment as she locked the setting into place.

Erin lured Logan and me into the frame. "Sit on the bench, newlyweds," she commanded. "We'll start with a few of just you two suckers, and then me and Shawn will squeeze in."

I laid the bouquet of white roses across my skirt as I settled into Logan's lap. He put his head on my shoulder and smiled at me. I curled my hand around his face and beamed back at him. For those minutes, it was just him and me. We hadn't gotten married because of the cancer, because of the tarred future that stretched in front of us.

We had done this because we were in love. We were love.

I sat like that again in him, and the look on his face told me that he was thinking the same thing, seeing that small window of time that we had spent here the other day, the first time that we had been here, too, when I cried at this tree during my treatments at UNC back when I was sick in high school. Maybe he was thinking of when I had come here without him, one Friday night where I opened my remission results here. It had been just me and my teddy bear and the guiding light of a gold star as I ripped my results open.

Remission. Not a cure, but I got my life back for a few years. That was enough then. Not anymore.

"Angel," I said, and he jumped at bit at the sound of my voice. "What do we do?"

"I don't know," he whispered, tugging me closer, the slick of his sweat sliding onto me. "I just want you to get better. I don't care about anything else, _tesorina_. I just want you."

"But…a baby?" I sighed. "Erase the cancer from it all. Just pretend that I was pregnant. What do you think about that?"

He held his breath for a moment. "You know that I love kids, you know that. I mean, hell, I'm going into pediatric dentistry, you know? I have always wanted to be a dad—to be a better dad than I had—no, no, that's not fair. Dad's not a bad man or a bad father at all, but—"

"Logan, I know, it's okay," I reassured him, stroking the line of his jaw.

He exhaled, the words taking on a higher pitch. "If the cancer wasn't a part of this? Yeah, I'd want you to have the baby, if _you_ wanted to. It's your body, and it's your choice. You have to live with it, you know? And I'd adore you regardless of what you decided."

"I'd want to have it, too," I admitted. "I want to be a mother so bad, Logan, I want to be a mother." I gulped down a sob. "This almost feels like a miracle, like, I never expected this would happen, I can't picture ending this if the cancer wasn't a part of it all. A baby will screw up everything we have planned, though. How do we both do graduate school with a baby?"

"You go to grad school first," he said in a sharp tone. "I can get a hygienist job after graduation, make us money and stuff. It's cake for me to get a job on my degree, it's not as easy for you to do the same with a diploma in psych, you know? Dental school will still be there. It's okay."

I squeezed his chin. "You should go first. You've wanted to be a dentist forever, Mr. I Carry a Toothbrush Everywhere."

"Yeah, but you and your dreams for your life? Pretty girl, I could never, ever ask you to defer them for anything in the world. Not how they carried you through your recovery from the fire and the first cancer fight. No, Mary Anne, I won't let you. During undergrad, we can lean hard on baby-sitters and the daycare at UNC—I mean, Todd and Veron's kids are in the daycare, and the guys just rave about it. It'll be tough, but we can make it work because that's what we do," he stated, rubbing his hands on my thighs. They were so large, they spread past the hem of my shorts and onto my pale skin.

Putting my small hands over his, I nodded. "Okay. So, in a non-cancer world, we keep going with the pregnancy…if it's healthy? What if it's not? What if it has ancephaly? Or chromosome 17 is broken, and our baby is basically doomed to have cancer, too? Do we want them to go through this, too? What if all of my radiation and the Cytoxan and the chemo has made other defects, worse ones than we can think of? Then what?"

I watched him lick his lips over and over until he made them moist enough to let words pass. "If the baby has ancephaly, we'll probably have to do what my parents did—if the baby doesn't have…if the brain isn't right, it has no life at all, and I don't think it's fair to it or to you to carry that to term. Unless the baby is a match for you—you know, otherwise healthy, and the doctors think than you could use it to save you. If you'd want to go through that kind of pregnancy, knowing that the baby would die. I'd be up to you, pretty girl. I would go through anything to give you a better chance to beat this."

"I don't know if I could deal with carrying a baby like that," I trembled. "I don't know if I could be so cruel to do that, to use my baby like that."

"I know," he sighed, kissing my cheek. "I know." He swallowed. "Why don't we, like, make some pro-con lists. Figure out what things we think are too…things that we can't do to our baby. Things that we think aren't cruel to pass on—like, I am stunned by the crap they've developed in three years to fight cancer, Mary Anne. In another decade, maybe they'll have come up with a therapy that would cure it or fix the Li-Fraumeni gene, right? For me, that's something that I could be okay if we discovered it in the amnio."

"What if I'm only in the first month?" I pressed.

"I want to save _you_," he repeated. "Saving you means more to me than my own breath. That's two months of waiting to start your treatment. If Dr. Wilks thinks that's too much of a risk, then…then it is."

"You'd pick me?" I murmured, looking at him.

"I'd pick you over _me_, pretty girl. No questions," he answered, tightening his arms around me. "You saved my life once, remember? I don't live without you. So, no dying. I married you because you swore that you wouldn't make me a widower. I'm holding you to that."

"I don't want to end up like your mom," I said, and I inhaled hard on my tears.

"I don't want you to be like her, either," he replied, and it broke my heart when he cried, and I cried with him again. Breaking my heart, breaking his heart—look what I was doing to the man I loved.

Oh: the other man I loved. Oh, how could I tell him. How?

I was going to kill my father with this. I thrust my face against my husband's, and he wiped my tears away. Not for me, not for him, but for my father. A man who got married, had a baby, and lost his wife.

I was his mirror to that wife. And he could barely look me in the eye sometimes, my dark hair and my brown eyes, the cancer that was me. He had foisted me onto Logan years ago because when my lover looked at me, he only saw _me_. I, I was pasted onto my mother in my father's eyes, and this would unglue him.

I stared at my husband and prayed, _Please don't let him end up like my father. Please don't let me break him, too_.

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I paced by the window as the phone rang. I answered it before looking at the caller ID. "Dawnie?" I chirped.

"Ew, no," a girl giggled back. "Do I look like a hippie?"

"I don't know, Randa, I can't exactly, like, see you," I laughed. I sat down on the couch so I could keep peeking out the window. "What's up, babe?"

"Not much. Stoneybrook is so boring, the color beige is feeling better about itself," she snorted. "I wish I had taken summer classes, May. I mean, Storrs is no metropolis, but at least there are people there. No one is in town—everyone is off doing internships or just whatevering at their colleges for the summer. I don't know—Austin and Alan were staying at UConn to take chemistry during Summer I, and now I wish I had stayed, too."

"Wait—are you back together with Alan?" I asked. Keeping up with my high school best friend and her rotating cast of guys was dizzying.

She snorted. "Un-like-lee. I think he's still carrying a torch for Claudia 'Superbitch' Kishi. She's _here_, May. I saw her at Argo's last night."

"What does she look like?" I gasped. Claudia. Now _that_ was a mess from my past I had put behind me. That was a story all its own.

I could hear Miranda shrug, her long mass of hair flipping around. "The same and different. She's a bit heavier than I remembered, but she looks great, you know? She cut her hair, though. It's in this really short, asymmetrical deal now. It's hot, actually. Bitch."

"What, _you_ want Alan?" I pressed.

"No. Actually, the rabbi's son? From UConn? He's been IMing me like crazy. He says he'll come and visit me if I want him to. I'm considering it," she said in a light tone, but I could hear the dripping of satisfaction. Miranda loved it when she was worshipped. And in me, she had a faithful follower. My Randa, all big words and big heart. My best friend at Duke, Erin, was so much like Miranda, it was soothing. Someone so confident and funny and brash, I could dip behind her and just watch her go.

Miranda loved to be watched. I wished she was here so I could.

"Randa, I like him," I gushed. "That email you forwarded me? So cute. Give him a shot!"

"That's what Emmy said," Miranda sighed. "Her and Vanessa—the two of them are ganging up on me."

"Well, count me in as one of the mob," I grinned. "I raise my pitchfork in support of Abe."

Miranda laughed so loud that I had to hold the phone away. "Okay. So, I have three things to talk about. You're family isn't there yet, right?"

"Nope," I grumped. "They actually coordinated their drives so that they should arrive within minutes of each other—and we are expecting them…well, like any minute. So, go, go, what's up?"

Like I didn't know. I had sent Miranda and Emily, our other best friend from Stoneybrook High, an email detailing the past week. The biopsy results from Monday, the wedding from Wednesday, the news from yesterday. Emily had called in a whorl of emotion last night—reducing me to tears as she threatened to get on a plane from Los Angeles _that very moment, don't you challenge me, May, I'm coming right the hell now. Cancer? Pregnant? Married to fucking Logan? I'm on my way_.

I begged her to wait. I begged her, and she agreed.

I steeled up for Miranda as she took a deep breath. "First, I'm reserving my ticket to come visit you in a month—for Barbara's birthday. Is it okay if I come for, like, a week? Come on Wednesday, fly out on Monday?"

"That's awesome!" I exclaimed. "Yes, please!"

"Okay," she giggled. "Second, Micah and his boyfriend set a date for their commitment ceremony—August second. Can you come?"

"I barely know your brother," I shrugged. "Are you sure he's okay with it?"

"Micah said that I could invite my friends. He doesn't care. Besides. Ry's away for the whole summer—she's coming home all special. I bet she rides in on her best broom for it. I'm gonna need my friends to deal with her crazy ass. She's been up to her old tricks again, May, all Something Witchy This Way Comes."

"I thought you said that your sister was calming down," I moaned, and then my blood went cold. Mariah was—well, she was odd. She was a bit of a _bruja_, making love potions and seeing the future and other bizarre things. I was happy she was in Ohio, nice and far away from me. I wasn't sure if I ever wanted to see her again. "Well, I'll look into it. Let me see what the summer holds, okay?"

"Yeah, about that—_you got married_?" she screamed. "To him!"

I rolled my eyes as Logan yelled out, "I heard that, Randa," from the study.

"And now you've got his Southern baby germs in you? Seriously, May! I kept hoping that you would get to Duke and upgrade, come on! You can get this annulled, right?" she chattered.

"Randa," I warned.

"I mean, you can do _so_ much better," she continued. "You deserve better than a nerd, babe. How about some hot actor, yeah? Or—ooh! A hockey player! I assure you, that whole puck handling thing really gives them some agility."

"Randa! Perspective!" I snapped. "Cancer? Baby? Hello?"

"I am keeping this in perspective," she sniffed. "Cancer: you'll beat it. Baby: wait until after the OB appointment before you freak since whatever week you're in is gonna decide most everything. But marriage? Come on. How boring. You're only nineteen, May, you're supposed to be whooping it up with every sexy stud at Duke. You know? See if anyone can give you a better O-face than your Mr. Basketball. Boooring," she moaned.

I exploded with laughter. "Oh, Randa, I love you."

"I love you, too, you big dork," she smiled. "May, joking aside? Do you want me to come down there? I know this is tough, do you want me to come?"

"Thanks, hon, but Dawn's coming," I told her.

"Yeah, but you and Dawn have…issues sometimes," Miranda said carefully.

"Well, I'll call you if I need you, okay?" I promised.

I could hear her nod. "For sure. I have nothing else to do. Just—"

But a white car caught my eye, the shine of the chrome lining of its grill sparking in the soft evening sun. Stacey's car. "Randa, there're here, I gotta go," I exclaimed.

"Go!" she called. "Call me later—love you."

"I will—love you, too" I said, snapping the phone shut. I rushed on over to the study where Logan was bent over a collection of textbooks and notes. "Come on, they're here!" I yelped, tugging at his arm.

He tossed aside his pen and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. "Who is 'they?' Your folks or the California delegation?"

"Stacey and Dawn," I grinned. I kissed him for as long as I dared—they were here!—and ran my fingers down his neck. "You ready?"

He shrugged. "No. But, I think being ready isn't exactly something that we get around here, huh?" He took my hand. "I finished my pro-con lists."

"Me, too. How about tomorrow at lunch, we go on out, just you and me, and talk it over? We have, like, seven hours worth of stuff to work out, angel," I proposed. I sat down on his knees and hugged him. "Is that okay? Waiting until Sunday?"

"I want to hear what Dawn and Stacey have to say," he told me. "And Sharon."

"And my dad?" I prompted.

Logan sighed. "I don't think he's going to be that helpful. Him and my folks. They aren't the fonts of wisdom on this one. We have a lot to talk about, pretty girl, but I can wait until tomorrow."

"I love you," I whispered, kissing him again.

"I had this feeling that you might," he grinned, pressing his lips to my neck, making me smile. "And thank you for giving me the time to think everything through—I really needed to just sort it all out." I beamed at him as he stood us back up. "By the way, dinner? Smells great. Was Kerry a good sous chef over the phone?"

He followed me out of the study as I laughed, "Oh, God, she was so obnoxious. I mean, no offense, but your sister is the biggest control freak I've ever come into contact with. I totally get that she's a great cook and all? But I don't need her to tell me that the noodles go into the colander to be drained, you know?"

"Gee, really? I thought that the water just magically disappeared from the pot," he scoffed, slapping his forehead. "Thank God Kerry was there to set you straight!"

"Stop it," I giggled. I halted in front of the door, noticing the glint of the ring on his hand. "Hey, wait, we gotta take these off."

He moaned, but he twisted at the band. "I love you, too," he sighed, handing it to me. I slipped off my engagement and wedding rings and quick ran to the study and slipped them into the top draw, concealing them under a pack of Post-It notes. Secrets, secrets: I hated them. But we were _going_ to tell, that had to mean something, right?

I dashed out the front door and ran to the BMW where my sister and her best friend were emerging, bending their bodies into long stretches. They had come all the way from Nashville today, though Dawn insisted it was because, "We are sick of driving. We kinda think we hate America. Too much nothingness."

"Yeah, I'm cool with ignoring what falls in between New York and San Fran," Stacey had added from the background the night before last. "Get me outta Oklahoma, stat."

But they had arrived—they were here! I barreled into my sister, and we rocked on our feet as we laughed so hard, our bodies shook down into just things of glee. This was my _sister_, but this was my friend. Because that is what we choose to be.

I grabbed a handful of her hair, the white-gold sheet of it falling down to her shoulders. "Are you growing it out?"

"Never," Dawn snorted. "Dude, I can wash my hair in five minutes. Do you know how freaking sweet that is?"

"That, and Dawnie looks better with shorter hair—it's totally, like, Reese Witherspoon Syndrome. Reese looks best with the face-framing bob, but the girl has a hard-on for extensions. You need to accept the fact that sometimes, shorter hair is the best choice for your face, no matter how much you may miss the ability to have sex hair," Stacey announced, slipping in to hug me.

I kissed her cheek and pulled back. "Sex hair?"

Stacey rumpled her own mass of dark blonde hair, the waves that fell a few inches below her collarbone. "Something to hold on to during," she explained, biting her lip and arching her eyebrows. Oh, Stacey.

They looked so good, strong and healthy and content. Stacey leaned over and whispered something to Dawn, their blonde heads bobbing, their tanned arms tangling together. Giggling madly, they bumped foreheads and bounced a little. The two of them, sharing secrets as always. But that was okay—the two of them were sisters, too, sisters by choice and not bonded into that relationship by marriage like Dawn and I. When they held hands, I expected the skin to open up and pulse the blood into the other girl's body.

Once, I had resented this. But not anymore. Not when I had someone like that, too. Sometimes I wondered if they could ever find a man who could complete them like their best friend. Maybe. I hoped.

"Crazy cat lady city, here we come," Stacey would laugh. "Me and Dawnie, living in the assisted living community, hitting on all of the hot widowers and milking their fortunes."

"Yeah, bring me the hot widowers, those sexy octogenarians," Dawn purred back.

I glanced over my shoulder at Logan, picking Stacey clear off the ground and giving her a tight hug. If I died now, he'd sure be a hot widower.

No. _Stop_.

"Lee, darling!" Dawn cooed, banging into him and shaking his face before slopping a kiss on his mouth. "How are you !"

"Nobody calls me that anymore, Dawn," he replied through gritted teeth.

"Yeah, but it suits you so well, you uptight war monger," Dawn said, punching his left shoulder, the good shoulder. "So, we have suitcases, and they are begging for you to carry them."

Stacey pressed a button on her keychain, snapping the trunk open. Logan walked around to the back of the car, and his mouth yawned open. "You two packed for a summer or for a freakin' decade?" he yelped.

"Always be prepared," Stacey sniffed. "We're in the South. Who knows what you people call 'fashion' down here. I mean, Internet shopping is our salvation, but I couldn't trust you people to be hip enough for my sartorial needs. Therefore, I brought my closets."

"Closets?" I repeated.

Stacey nodded. "From my dorm at Stanford and in New York. Like I said. Just in case. Dawnie said that Lee has hot single teammates. I must plum their depths, and that requires options. I mean, one guy might be a leather skirt guy, the other might be a Seven jeans guy."

"How many guys are you planning on, Stace?" Logan asked, hauling out a suitcase the size of Delaware.

"How many teammates do you have?" she replied.

"That, and classmates from Stacey's econ class, random men in Durham and here, I mean, the possibilities are endless," Dawn added. "I, myself, am counting on meeting some gorge Southern gentleman and having a torrid romance that lasts from late May until the first week of August."

I laughed, slinging my arm around her waist. "Can you really plan it like that?"

"I certainly expect to," Dawn announced, flipping her short hair. "Come on, Stace needs to test her blood sugar and get some food—we should have dinner soon, May. Lee, sweetie, can you just, like, put the bags in our room? Thanks."

He caught my eye and pressed his lips together in a thin line, but I shrugged. Sucks to be him. Stacey put her arm around my shoulder, and the three of us bumbled into the house. "It's so cute!" Dawn giggled. "Do they give the athletes, like, the cute houses?"

"I don't know, honestly—a senior had this place last year, with his wife and kid? And the day that Karl put down his move-out date, Logan dashed into the Res Life office and signed up to rent it. It's a pretty tight deal—they pay the rent, he still gets his meal plan at the dorms, all we have to pay is utilities. I figured we could split the bills three ways," I suggested.

"Three?" Stacey said, raising her eyebrow as I led them through the living room, the dining room, and into the kitchen. "You two pooling your money?"

"Yeah," I said, avoiding her gaze and walking to the refrigerator. "Um, everything here on the third shelf? Where it says 'Stacey?' All of the food there is sugar free. We went to Whole Paycheck and had one of the workers there help us find diabetic happy food."

"Aw!" Stacey squealed, shaking me in a hug. "That's so sweet, you'll have to let me pay you back, okay?"

"You can buy dinner when we go out," I grinned.

"What's Whole Paycheck?" Dawn asked, poking through the fridge and tossing Stacey an orange as her best friend pulled out a small black machine the size of a change purse. Stacey pressed her finger on a silver spot and waited a moment until the machine beeped and a number flashed on its gray screen. Her lips curved into a smile, and she dug her fingernails into the orange, stripping off the peel.

I looked from her to Dawn. "Whole Foods—it's an organic market. We got the meat there, too, Dawnie, so the chicken? Is happy chicken. Happy and friggin' expensive chicken—it's why we call the place Whole Paycheck," I said, rolling my eyes.

"That's very rad of you two, snaps," Dawn beamed. She grabbed two yogurts and glanced at me. "May, you look _good_. Like you've been eating. This warms my cold, dark heart. Do you want a snacky?"

I reached into the basket of peppers and picked a green bell out, taking a bite. I had been in the mood for them lately—cravings? "I've just been feeling hungry lately," I answered, looking down at the floor.

"Excellent," Stacey said. "I love me some healthy May, babe."

Dawn clapped her hands together. "Spoons?"

I tugged open a drawer and handed her and Stacey utensils. "So, explain to me why you dropped your class at Chapel Hill. What are you going to do this summer, Dawn? Other than hang out with me."

"That about sums it up," Dawn shrugged. "I took a creative writing class last semester, and I'm really interested in writing now. I think…I think I'm going to try to write something about Vista this summer. Maybe a book. I'm not sure. My prof totally suggested it, and I was like, Well, maybe. The fifth anniversary is coming up soon, and people still talk about it—it was the worst school shooting in history, and the reasons were so twisted, it's still, like, something that grabs interest. So. He said that I should try to write it, and I could do an independent study in the fall and edit it. Let us take a moment to raise the roof for the awesomeness of SFSU, friends, a school that understands the needs of its creative students."

"I did an independent study, Dawn," I pointed out.

"Bah," she sniffed. "Whatever. San Fran State kicks Duke's ass any day."

Stacey frowned. "Babe, I'm not one to knock on your school, but I kinda think that May's uni is a bit better than yours."

"Elitist!" Dawn accused, pointing her spoon at Stacey. "Bourgeoisie prejudice!"

Stacey looked at me. "Well, _yeah_. But when you're in a room with a chick from Stanford and a babe from Duke, you're not gonna get the proletariat masses, Dawn."

"At least Lee goes to a state school," Dawn sighed. "We can keep it real around here." She paused. "Wait. Logan as ally? Wrong. I'll fight the good fight on my own."

"You two have to be nice to him," I ordered. "He's doing his clinical hours this summer _and_ summer training, he's under a lot of stress, so be kind. Only give him shit for an hour a day, understand?" Clinic, training, cancer, a baby…

Stacey pouted, "But that was going to be my fun time! Come home from class and pick on Logan. He's such an easy target. Oh, oh, May, my first class is Tuesday, so I want to go to Duke on Monday and get, like, a tour and stuff? How to get to the building and whatever."

I grinned at her. "Awesome, totally." I had a vision of walking through the summer-streaked trees of Duke's campus, bending my head with Stacey's and giggling over her econ homework, my psych research. Scholars all. Maybe we could become close, too?

Dawn poked at the bowls on the counter. "Salad, beans, mmm garlic bread—what's in the oven?" she drooled, opening up the door and sending out a blast of cheese-scented steam all over the kitchen. "What's this?"

"It's homemade macaroni—Logan's sister's specialty. She walked me through it with annoying diligence," I grinned. "She's coming to stay with us for a week in June for a diving camp—Kerry's a sweetheart, but she's a tiny bit intense. It's as if Logan was as tightly wound as he is about school and basketball but about everything."

"Oh, Christ, _that's_ a great introduction," Stacey snorted. "I'm sure she'll be a delight."

"She's adorable," I insisted. "Just…competitive." I heard a clatter at the door, and the front of the house filled with the sound of flat, New England voices. My father. My stepmother. Dawn clapped her hands and raced by me.

We reached out folks at the same time, diving towards our biological parent. Dawn and her mother, their light hair swirling together as they hugged. My father and I bending together in silence.

Dad touched my cheek. "Hi, Annie," he smiled, kissing my forehead. "It's so good to see you again."

"Hi, Daddy," I murmured, ducking back against his body. His hands rested on my back for a moment, and he circled around my spine. He was so proud of me, I knew it—a friend of mine worked in Dad's law firm, and she said that Dad was always bragging about my research, my grades, how well I was doing at Duke.

Oh, how I was going to hurt him, I realized, holding him close. We had reached a point in our relationship where he trusted that I would be okay, that it was okay for him to love me as much as he wanted to—that I wouldn't leave him. That I wouldn't die. He had forgotten about the cancer, I knew he had. Unlike my mother, his first wife, I had made it through and lived, lived for years now.

When I pulled back from him, I looked into his face. His hair had receded farther back on his head, a thinning batch of hair several shades lighter than mine, the brown of a sun-baked stretch of soil. His face was a maze of lines, framing his mouth, the area of his eyes. He adjusted his glasses, and I saw myself flash in them—we didn't look alike at all. I looked like her, my mother. I looked just like her.

Forgive me for that, too.

My stepmother stepped over and took my face in her hands. "The South has been very good to you," she grinned.

"Hi, Sharon," I sighed, holding her close. "I've missed you."

"I have missed you! A telephone call once a week is not enough Mary Anne in my life," she teased. "I'm hoping that when we get back from Hilton Head, you and I can spend some time together, how does that sound?"

"Terrific—I'm so excited you and Dad are taking a vacation, though. Lots of golf and sun," I said.

Sharon grimaced. "I just don't see the appeal in golf. I'm hoping that your father and Mr. Hijapi decide that Rachna and I aren't needed, and she and I can just stretch out on the beach instead."

"Rachna is a tennis player, Sharon," Dad remarked. "You better work on your forehand with her."

Making a disgusted face, Sharon shook her head. "Dawnie, see, these East Coasters just don't value the concept of beach time."

"It's enough to make you wonder why we need a country outside of Cali," Dawn said, narrowing her eyes at us.

I looked around the room. "Where's J.D.! You didn't leave her at the hotel, where is she!"

"Your dog got intercepted by your boyfriend—he immediately took her on a walk," Dad smiled, and I forced myself to keep my smile neutral. Boyfriend. "Poor J.D.—when we checked into the hotel, she had to stay in the car? She was leaping around like a jumping bean on all of the seats, just so upset that she was left behind."

"I have my doggie back!" I sang, tossing my hands above my head. I dropped, them, though, looking from my father to my stepmother. "Not that you two haven't been incredible to watch over her these years."

"Oh, Mary Anne, relax. She's your dog," Sharon laughed. "Richie and I are thinking of getting a golden retriever, though, once we get back to Stoneybrook."

"You stopped by and checked on Andrae, right?" Stacey called. "Mom says that he's fine, but Mom also dresses him up in frilly girlie dog clothes."

"I'm all for respecting the fact that sexuality isn't a fixed thing, but seriously. Our dog is a boy dog," Dawn announced, nodding at Stacey.

"Andrae is fine," Sharon grinned. "Maureen, Dee Pike, and I had lunch just the day before, and Andrae and J.D. went insane in the McGills' backyard chasing after the squirrels that perched up on the Pike's fence. Then the triplets came out and tried to knock the squirrels off with pop cans, and it was just ridiculous," Sharon shuddered. "Dee is one brave lady."

"Or insane," Stacey suggested, glancing at Dawn and I. "Can we eat? I am starving. It's totally quarter past dinnertime."

Dad glanced at me. "That does sound good. I brought wine, if you girls would like. And it's red, Stacey—your mother said that you can have a little red wine."

"Oh, score!" Dawn crowed. "Liquor us up, Richard!"

"No, Dawn," Dad said, his voice tearing between patience and annoyance. "But your mother thinks that you girls are old enough for responsible drinking."

"I don't drink, Dad," I shrugged. "Not with my depression meds. And Logan's all on this kick to wait until he turns twenty-one, so I guess that means…more for Dawn?" My sister pumped her fist by her side and wagged her tongue in victory.

Sharon rolled her eyes. "Do you need help setting the table, Mary Anne?"

I shook my head. "I have everything set. I've been so excited, I set the table, like, after breakfast," I admitted, blushing a bit.

"Well, I bet dinner will be wonderful," she winked, putting her arm around me. "I'll fill up a pitcher with water, take care of the glasses. Do you have stemware, Mary Anne?"

"Um, like wine glasses? Yeah, above the sink," I said, following her into the kitchen. I heard Stacey and Dawn chatting with Dad in the dining area, the pop of the cork from a bottle. The warmth of my stepmother's body filled the space between us, and I couldn't help looking at her, this lovely woman humming as she dumped ice into a green-glass pitcher. She had nursed me through my time at the Yale hospital when I was treated for breast cancer; I had an urge to take her hands and press them together as if we were in prayer and beg her to stay with me. Take care of me. Mother me through this.

_I'm sick, Sharon. I'm sick again, and I'm pregnant, and I don't know what to do. Tell me. I'm lost and terrified, help me_.

But I put my hands around one of the bowls and shuffled away from her. In and out of the kitchen, seeing my sister and her best friend settling down on the bench on the far side of the table, my father hover around the high backed chair by the window.

"Sit, Daddy, I want you to sit there, Sharon to sit at the other end. Just like at home," I prodded, and he smiled at me, settling down where I had asked. Him, the head of the household, even here. In my home. I wanted him to know how important he was to me.

"I was dreaming of food from, like, Winston-Salem on," Dawn said, sniffing the hot mass of bread bubbling with garlic-rich butter. "I told Stace, 'May promised us a feast the moment we walked in the door.' I mean, I'm not bitching, but when I walked in the door, there was no food on the table. I'm feeling kind of lied to."

I flinched, looking at my bare left hand. Liar, liar.

By the time I set the casserole dish on the table, I heard the door open again and the chatter of nails on the wood floor. I gasped, falling to my knees as my dog came bounding into the room, her mouth hanging open in that strange dog smile, yipping in delight as she darted into my arms. That long pink tongue of hers covered my face in kisses, and I cooed to her, rubbing my fingers over the floppy triangle of her ears. She snapped her teeth at me, so I itched her stomach until her tail thumped in a rapid beat. I ran my hand down her body, the body of a beagle with the coloring of a yellow lab, shedding off a layer of hair.

"She loves it here," Logan told me, squatting down next to us and rolling her leash around his fingers. "You should have seen her when we got up to Franklin—she was snapping at all of the cars passing by like a moron."

"You're the best doggie ever, Just Dog, aren't you," I said, mushing my voice up into a sweet, sticky tone. "The best sweet puppy in the whole, wide world."

"Hello, don't make us get Andrae here for a doggie face off," Stacey laughed. "Our hound would totally take your shrimpy little fake beagle any day."

I patted J.D. one last time before using Logan to tug myself back up. I could tell he wanted to kiss me but he just brushed his hand over the small of my back. I smiled at him, tipping my head at the table. "Ready for dinner?"

"Who cares—_I_ am," Dawn retorted. We sat down at the bench opposite my sister and Stacey; after he put the napkin in his lap, he crossed himself and looked over at my father.

"I feel obligated to pray now," Dad laughed. "Should we?"

"That would be nice, Richard—we haven't all been together since Christmas," Sharon noted, reaching out to take Dawn and Logan's hands. I put my left hand in my husband's right hand, and his thumb swept over my naked ring finger. Dad slipped his hand in mine, and I smiled at him. I clutched hard to my husband as I stared at my father, waiting for him.

"Heavenly Father, we thank you for these gift that we are about to receive. We thank You for the blessings of good company and family and ask you to keep us in your grace. And please watch over Jeff, and bring him home to us safely at the end of his school year," Dad added, glancing at Sharon who nodded with a fierceness that startled me. "Amen."

"Amen," we replied, and Dawn snatched a piece of bread.

"Food that doesn't come in a take out bag," she sighed. "Thank the Lord, indeed."

"How was the drive?" Sharon asked, scooping out a mound of salad.

"So boring, we practically passed out somewhere in Texas. We actually really liked driving at night—that way we weren't bored to tears by the repeating scenes of trees, bare earth, trees, bare earth, a city, hooray! Tree, bare earth," Stacey droned, her head dropping down against her chest. "After out trip back out in August, I am forever flying cross-country. Never again."

"What if you go to graduate school out East?" Sharon prompted. "Dawnie said you were thinking about Northwestern or MIT."

"Or even Duke," Stacey admitted, smiling at me. "I mean, I'm here to study with my old advisor. I'm so ticked that he took a job here—he's incredible, you know. He's doing this really awesome post-Keynesian analysis on how third world capitalist economies survive in oppressive leadership structures. It's like the China model."

"The China model?" Dad frowned.

Stacey launched into a long lecture about post-structuralist economic schemes, democratic governance of economic markets under the tension of evolving governmental hierarchies. Only Dad seem fascinated; Sharon and Dawn looked on in benign interest while Logan and I kept exchanging horrified looks.

He bent down towards me and whispered, "I think I just realized how you and I sound when we ramble on about, like, SSRI inhibitors and the importance of preventing gingivitis or, like, a zone defense."

"No, angel, that's how _you_ sound. SSRI inhibitors are intriguing stuff," I said, rubbing his thigh. I kept my left hand there, poking a bundle of food into my fork. I had been so much hungrier lately—the baby? Was that why?

When Stacey finally finished lecturing, I looked at Dad. "How is Cecily Hirsch fitting into the firm?"

"Terrific—though I am making her spend the summer studying for the bar exam. But she's already set up her office. She has a lovely photo of Barbara on her desk," Dad said, his eyes flickering away from me. My Barbara. I felt my eyes glaze over in tears, and I wiped at them with the back of my hand. After two years, you think it would hurt less to think about my Babsie, killed while fighting with the Israeli army. It didn't—the hurt just disappeared quicker now. It flipped over in my stomach and bunked back down to where it hid, somewhere in my belly, somewhere under my heart. What would Barbara say about all of this?

She'd listen, she'd tug at her hair, and then she'd offer her opinions. That was what Barbara did. If I ended this pregnancy, would my baby be with her? If I died, would I get to be with her?

I shivered, scooting closer to Logan. I had to stop this.

Dawn talked—her classes this past year. Sharon talked—her job up in New Haven. I talked—my summer research project. Were we all telling the truth or were we clipping out details, shaping stories that sounded best to each other? We were laughing, we were sharing, we were a family, the six of us at this table, pouring my father's wine and ladling out huge helpings of the creamy noodles. When all of the food was gone, I glanced at Logan.

"Want to help me with the cake?" I asked, and he nodded and jumped up from the table so fast it shook the bench. I looked at Stacey and added, "I got a sorbet for you, is that okay? Lemon?"

"You are totally sucking up, aren't you, May?" Stacey grinned. "Just admit it, you're trying to get on my good side."

I was trying to get on everyone's good side. Because I was about to flip everything over to the dark places that we try to keep sewn away.

"The desk drawer with the pens and stuff—under the green Post-Its," I whispered to him, and his face washed in relief as he walked out of the room. While I set the candles on the cake, he came in through the back door and unfolded his hand to reveal the three rings in his right palm. I plucked his ring, a thick gold circle, and pushed it back onto his hand.

"I take you," I whispered, lifting onto my toes so I could kiss his cheek. He blushed back at me and grabbed my wedding ring, sliding up my finger and then locking it into place with the engagement ring that he had saved for years. Waiting for me.

"I take you, Mary Anne," he breathed back. He lined kisses from my ear to the side of my mouth. I wanted him to kiss me, _kiss me_, but I knew that he wouldn't until he brushed his teeth. He had issues, all right, tiny neuroses and tics that popped up everywhere. I learned them all, these signposts and cairns—and I knew how to break them sometimes. Like now, looping a finger over the button of his jeans and flicking my finger against the soft line of dirty blonde hair that drifted down from his stomach.

That would make him kiss me, a deep thing that rocked into my mouth and down into my chest. My heart fluttered like a bird; I was so scared of going into that room and telling my family the truth, and right now, I had this feeling that I could just fly away from everything as long as I stayed _here_.

J.D. nudged her nose against my ankle, and I broke away from Logan, grinning down at her. "Do you want cake?" I asked her. "I'm sorry, J.D., but Kerry was Dessert Nazi about me not screwing up the chocolate genoise. So it's not for anyone who can't appreciate how hard it was to keep the eggs and sugar warm."

"It's the best cake recipe in the world, J.D., take my word for it," he assured the dog. J.D. snapped at us, so Logan bent down to scoop her up, rubbing his fingers against her stomach.

"It's the traditional Bruno celebration cake," I recited, trying to mimic Kerry's self-important tone. I realized how much of the sound of the South had crept into my own voice. How much I sounded like Logan and his family now. I bit back my smile as I placed three candles on the cake—one for each day that we had been married.

Or maybe, one light for me, one for him, and one for… I gave my body a shake and brought the match to the waiting wicks.

"Cake me!" Dawn roared from the dining room. I looked over at Logan, and he put J.D. down and grabbed Stacey's sorbet, following me back to where my family was waiting. I switched the lights off, letting the golds and dusky reds of the setting sun paint the room. As I looked down at my hands, I noticed how the diamond in my ring seized the light and split rainbows all over the white walls. Something broken and beautiful, all of the colors of the light.

The moment I set the cake down, Dawn grabbed my hand. "He proposed, holy shit," she gasped.

I pulled back and sat back down next to Logan. "Well, kind of," I corrected, but Sharon lifted her napkin to her eyes and dabbed at the corners.

"When?" she sniffed, smiling as she rubbed Logan's shoulder. "Were you waiting to tell us?"

"Monday night—I actually asked him," I admitted, glancing over at Dad. His eyes were shifting between the two of us, his mouth shaking somewhere between a smile and the watery line of tears. Good crying, it had to be, from the shine his face had.

"But I had the ring already," Logan added, putting his arm around my shoulder. "I'd had it for awhile and stuff."

Stacey stood and reached over the table to grab my hand. "Okay, let's see how you did, Lee," she giggled, pulling my fingers to his face. But the smile dripped down as she gazed at my finger. "May, I'm quick with math, you know, and I count two rings here."

"Yeah," I said slowly. "Two."

Dawn shot out her hand and snapped her fingers in front of Logan's face, this demanding noise that ran down from her shocked face. Sharon reached down to his left hand, his writing hand, his wedded hand, and breathed in a sharp shot of air as she saw the ring there. "You two," she stuttered, staring down at it. "You got married, didn't you?"

"Wednesday, yeah," Logan answered, smiling at her.

"You're sick," Dad thudded, staring at me. "You're sick again. That's why _you_ proposed, that's why you two got married. The cancer's back."

"Yes," I said, and he buried his face in his hands.

Dawn let out a whimper and fell into Stacey's arms. "Oh, no," she mumbled, "no, no, Mary Anne, no."

"Yes," I repeated. "It's Hodgkin's lymphoma now—in my lymph nodes, and it's spreading into my lungs. But they caught that real quick and took the tumor out. Hodgkin's has a really good survival rate, it does, so it's not like the breast cancer," I insisted, gazing from Sharon to the lump of girls across from me, to my father who refused to look me in the eye.

Sharon balled the napkin up and swiped at her face. "Okay, that's good, that's good," she said, reaching over and rubbing Dawn on her back. "What do we do, sweetheart? What happens now, what do you need me and your daddy to do?"

"Well, it's going to be pretty routine to treat it—chemo and radiation again, though the cycles are different now. They're going to keep a close watch on my heart, but Dr. Wilks is very optimistic that I'll get through this just fine. But…well, there's this thing," I began, touching Dad on the arm. "I might get a bone marrow transplant or a stem cell transplant—it would help negate the Li-Fraumeni Syndrome. Maybe be a cure."

Dad let his hands fall back into his lap. "Annie, you and I don't share a blood type, we know this. I can't be a donor," he muttered, his head rocking back and forth.

"I know. But…if I had a baby, and the baby has my blood type and has healthy genes and all, the baby could be a match," I said, closing my eyes. I waited there in the dark.

The fire of my father's hand on my face made my eyes explode with light. I rocked back into Logan, and my eyes snapped open, still starred over with the white and red pricks in my pupils.

"How dare you," Dad seethed. "How _dare_ you say something like that."

I put my hand on my face, touching the stinging place that swallowed my right cheek. Dawn had pulled back from Stacey, staring at my father with an open mouth. He had slapped her once, too, but she had just sneered at him, bearing that impact like a mark of pride. I couldn't. I wouldn't. My father had hit me, and the snarl of his mouth said he would do it again.

"Richard," Sharon barked. "For God's sake—"

"How dare you bring a baby into the world when you could die," he shouted. "A baby that you could abandon when you die. What is Logan supposed to do if you die, huh? He's twenty years old, do you honestly think he could handle that? Play basketball, go to college, and raise a baby when you die?"

"When?" I trembled. "You keep saying when, Dad. _When_ I die."

"How can you ever even think about having a baby!" Dad kept yelling. "How can you even contemplate it." His face caked over in anger, a purpling mass of misery ringing his mouth and eyes. "I never would have had a baby if I thought Alma would die, Mary Anne, leaving me with a baby like that. Never. How can you be so selfish."

"She's pregnant already," Dawn inhaled, holding hard to Stacey as she stared down the table at me. "You're pregnant, aren't you, May."

Logan nodded, kissing my head. I turned to look at my father, and the stars bloomed again in my vision, blurring my father away as his hand struck my face again. And then again.

A whorl of blue flashed by my fuzzed eyes, and my father's chair clattered to the floor. I rubbed at my eyes to make the blue come into focus—the sea shade of Logan's shirt as he seized my father and threw him against the wall. He balled up his hands in my father's polo shirt and lifted him off the floor, slamming him again into the plaster, the pictures in the living room rattling from the force.

"You hit my wife one more time, I swear to God, I will end you," Logan hissed. "You cannot do this to her, do you understand me? You take your anger out on her with your hands again, I will make your body hurt in places that you didn't even know existed."

My father looked so small there in the shadow of my husband, so small and so old, shrunken down on his body in the wake of my news. What had I done to him, what had I done? This wasn't my father: this was the mass of broken pieces that I had slammed apart, jangling in that body.

Logan set my father down on the floor and released his hands, the shirt wrinkled and stretched from where he had been clutching. I watched him stretch out his fingers and ball them back into fists, almost waiting for my father to strike at him.

Dad ran his hands down his shirt and stepped around Logan. "If you bring a baby into this, I will never speak to you again," Dad declared, pointing at me. "I ruined your life when your mother died, and I will not watch it happen again when you pass away and leave that poor baby alone with a father who can't cope." Dad gritted his teeth and added, "Mary Anne, I raised you to be a good woman. But I failed, didn't I. I failed, and this is who you are. A selfish, short-sided girl who was stupid about sex and is about to ruin two lives."

Dad marched out of the room, yelling, "I'll be at the hotel, Sharon," as he stormed out the front door. I sat there, my hand on my face, as the sound of his car faded into the distance and all I could hear was the dark ticking of the clock on the wall.


	4. Chapter 3

My computer is going to the shop for repairs this week, so it might be a bit before the next update—I'm hoping for a loaner, though! (And yes, I am going to update the Claudia story, too; _this_ is my warm up writing every day before I tackle my grad school stuff since Mary Anne's voice is my own style. Claudia…she's a challenge, yall.) Anyway, I apologize if there is a delay in posting, please forgive me!

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I jumped from my seat and raced to the kitchen, yanking the phone book out from under the sink. Sharon followed behind me, not speaking. She grabbed a dishtowel from the counter and walked to the freezer. I could hear her rummaging in the icebox as I flipped through the pages.

"Here, let's put this on your cheek," she murmured, coming up next to me with the bundle of ice.

"No," I said, squirming away. "I need to do this."

"No, Mary Anne," she stated. "Come on, look at me." I turned to her and let her press the towel to my face, the cold of the frozen water biting through the terry cloth and cooling the fired spot on my cheek. I wondered if it looked like my father's hand, the fingers spaced out from my mouth to the ridge of my cheekbone. She surrounded the left side of my head with her other hand and held the icepack tight to me so I couldn't bend away.

I could hear the sharp sounds of Stacey and Dawn in the other room. "He's insane," Dawn snapped. "How dare he do that to May. I wish you had punched him, Logan. Really. If Stacey hadn't been, like, digging her fucking nails into my palm, I swear, I would have ripped the rest of the hair off of his head."

"Dude, Richard has never handled the cancer well," Stacey sighed. "I knew that if she relapsed he'd finally lose it. Come on, Dawn, this is too close to what happened to _him_. You gotta give him a break, right?"

"No," Dawn retorted. "Mom, your husband is a dick."

Sharon tipped my head so that I had to look at her. "I am so sorry, Mary Anne."

"He's right," I mumbled. "I can't bring a baby into this." I jerked away from her and went back to the phone book. I went to the alphabetical index and ripped out the page I wanted. I walked through the kitchen into the utility room, going into the study. My phone was still resting on the desk under one of Logan's notebooks, and I flipped it open and punched in the hotline number.

"What are you doing?" Sharon asked, putting her hands on my shoulders.

"I'm calling Planned Parenthood, that's what. I'm going to end this, I'm not going to do this. He's right, Sharon, I'm selfish and only thinking about myself. _I_ want to be a mother. _I_ want to use this baby to save me—to save _me_. Screw the kid, I just want its freakin' blood, right? Selfish, selfish—Dawn said it, it's all about me, huh? Mary Anne wants a baby, Mary Anne wants, Mary Anne wants, Mary Anne wants," I hissed, "I wanted to get married, now I've roped Logan into all of this. When I die, I'll have completely screwed him up—and what if I leave a kid behind, Sharon? Now he's Dad all over again. Mary Anne wanted to get married, Mary Anne wants a baby, Mary Anne doesn't _need_ it, but who cares, huh?"

Sharon grabbed my wrist and pried the phone out of my hand. "Stop."

"No!" I exploded, shoving away. "You don't get it, do you? Stop mothering me, Sharon, tell me the truth, like he did. Tell me that I'm terrible, tell me that I deserve to be sick because I'm terrible and selfish and—" I pressed the backs of my hands to my eyes and screwed them against the bone of my forehead. "Tell me I deserved that, please, Sharon, tell me."

My stepmother pulled my hands down and shook me hard by the shoulders. "Mary Anne, stop. Stop. Don't let him inside of your head like this. Your dad has so many issues from Alma's death, you know this, and he can't stop projecting them onto you. I swear, honey, he reminds me of Stacey, the way she just locked things away inside of her during high school. He locked everything with Alma's death and sending you away and put it on a shelf inside of him, and this pries it all open. Your father needs help, Mary Anne, serious help to get through this, but he won't get it. He loves you so much, you know this, and he will think this over and in the morning, he's going to loathe himself for what he's done."

She grabbed the page from the phone book and shoved it into the pocket of her khakis. "I will not let you act in his wake, Mary Anne. If you think that terminating the pregnancy is best, I want that to be your decision. Not something that his pain has shoved you to do."

"You're not a bad person, May," Dawn said, coming into the room. "I can't believe you still remember that All About You thing. Let it go—you're not selfish. You're petty and short-tempered, not selfish," she grinned, putting her arms around my shoulders. Kissing my cheek, she added, "We took a vote out in the dining room. Two votes for you being awesome, one vote for you being incredibly hot. That was Stacey, for the record," she teased.

"What should I do?" I asked her. "I don't know what to do."

Sharon pushed the textbooks out of the way and sat on the desk. She tugged my hands, urging me to sit in the chair. Dawn pulled the other desk chair over and sat next to me as I whispered my way through the past week. No, even farther back—the moment I leaned over the sink in my dorm and coughed up a large spit of blood.

The blood, the biopsy, the proposal, the wedding, the appointment at the hospital.

"Shit," Dawn said, shaking her head. "I have no clue what to do. Mom?" Dawn put her hands on Sharon's knee. "Mom, tell us what to do."

"I don't know," Sharon admitted, snaking a finger along the curve of her eyes, shaking the tears away. "Honestly. I guess…see what week you are in. I think that if you have to wait more than a month to start treatment, you should get an abortion, Mary Anne. And if you keep going forward with this, if there is something wrong with the fetus, then you should end it then."

"What about…what if I die, Sharon? And leave Logan alone with a baby? Dad's right, it would be…" I put my head in my hands. "Who does that? Who has a baby for such a terrible reason?"

"You want the baby regardless of what it can do for your health," Dawn replied. "Right?"

"Yeah," I sighed. "I think I do. And he says he wants to have the baby, so I should just trust him, right? God, I'm so scared, though, I can barely handle it."

"Thank the Lord and Jake Gyllenhaal that I'm here," my sister said, clapping her hand over her heart. "I'm gonna be here, I'm gonna be your support."

"You sure?" I answered, looking at her. "You kinda…flipped on me last time."

"Well, years of therapy have made me into a pretty strong _chica_," Dawn smiled. "I haven't had a good cause to rally around since junior year. Keep Mary Anne Sane is my new battle cry."

"Sharon?" I asked, leaning my head on her leg.

My stepmother wound her fingers in my hair. "Do you want me to come down here? I can stay with you—I can get an apartment down here and be with you through this."

"No, you need to be with Dad," I sighed. "But I can talk to you, right? Like, call you even three times a day if I need it, right?"

"Four times is my cut off line," she declared.

"If you were her _real_ daughter, then it'd be cool, but you're just a stepkid," Dawn sniffed, pausing for a moment before bursting into laughter. She trailed off as Sharon gave her a dirty look. "What, too soon?"

"Just a tad," Sharon rolled her eyes.

I glanced up at Sharon. "Do you really think he's going to feel bad about that?"

"I do. I hope it will be as soon as the moment I get back to the hotel, but it might take a while. We might not stop here after Hilton Head," Sharon warned me. "We'll just have to see. Please, don't hate him. Please don't. You saw how happy he when he thought that you were engaged. I'll work on him—I always get him to listen to me, don't I?"

"Yeah," I agreed, still resting there against her. "Daddy needs to see someone. I can't have him doing that to me again. I'm serious—I won't talk to him again until he gets help and can deal with me without seeing Mom."

"I'll call Ana Paves in the morning—we'll work something out, I promise. You have enough to worry about without bringing your father into this. Have you told Logan's parents yet?" Sharon asked, squeezing my neck.

I shook my head. "They're coming down next weekend—his cousin Sosie is stationed at Fort Bragg down in Fayetteville, so they wanted to see her before she's off to the never-ending sinkhole that is Iraq." I lowered my voice and said, "His dad threatened him once? Said he would kill him if he ever got a girl pregnant. I'm absolutely, completely freaked that Lyman will pound the crap out of his son over this."

"I'll call the cops on his ass," Dawn declared. "I'm not kidding. I'll be lurking with 911 on speed dial if Mr. Bruno tries anything. Damn it, I cannot believe I didn't rip Richard a new one. I'm losing my edge," she moaned, slapping her forehead.

"If you had punched your stepfather, Dawn Read, I would have murdered you. This isn't Jerry Springer," Sharon snapped.

"Let's go back into the dining room, have the cake," I suggested, standing up and smoothing my hands over my sundress. "I mean, it was really hard to make—genoise is a very finicky dessert, I want to see if I did it okay."

"Is it organic?" Sharon pressed, and then she held up her hands. "You know what? I don't care. I will indulge just this once for you, sweetheart. Besides. We have to celebrate—you're married! Erase everything else—that's wonderful, Mary Anne. I couldn't have chosen a better man for you," she smiled, standing next to me and kissing the aching side of my face.

"I could have—Justin Timberlake. Or if we want to stay in the athlete mold, Dwayne Wade. Oh, oh, how about a Bay Area hottie—Alex Smith? My God, the way that man throws a football, can you imagine how smokin' fine he'd be with his hands on you?" Dawn sighed, fanning herself. "Mom, honestly, I have a new respect for the NFL after seeing him in person in the Haight. You can totally get me season tickets to the Niners games for Christmas."

"I'll be sure to pass that on to your father," Sharon said in a dry voice. We walked back through the kitchen to where Stacey and Logan huddled together. She was shaking her head, gesturing with her wine glass as she murmured something to him. Resting his head on his fist, he kept sighing as she talked.

Dawn plopped down into Dad's empty chair. "Okay, so I'm in charge now, and I say that Richard is a douche. Gimme the wine, damn it." She poured herself a large glass and glared at me hovering at the entrance to the room. "Can't drink because of your meds. Wrong-o, May-o. I always know when something shifty is up, because your cover stories are never quite…right. I mean, dude, you told me that you were doing tequila shots like your ass was in Tijuana while you watched Lee's first game back."

"It was stressful," I protested. "And Erin was totally enabling me."

"Yeah, I bet," Stacey snorted, sliding into Sharon's chair. "I'm the Mommy, Dawnie."

"One hot mama," Dawn grinned, reaching across the table to fill up Stacey's glass. "Can you have one more?"

"Sure—my diabetes is totally my bitch lately," she beamed, raising her glass to Sharon sitting down on her left. "I swear, signing up for that trial was the best thing that ever happened to me. Some days, I almost feel normal. If I still didn't look like the damned chubby Dixie Chick, though," she muttered, pinching the phantom fat on her hips.

"That's fantastic, Stace. I'm so happy that you're doing well—and you are _not fat_," I insisted, shuffling up to Logan. I wrapped one arm around his chest and one around his neck. "Are you okay?" I asked him.

"I wanted to hit your dad so badly, I wanted to make him bleed, and I'm not sorry," he mumbled, sinking his head against my arm. "Are you mad at me?"

"I am," Dawn replied. "I'm pissed you _didn't_ clock him one." Sharon pointed at her, shaking her finger, and Dawn crossed her arms over her chest. "Mom, don't. I get where his nutter came from, but everyone in this room can hate him, and that's that."

"I don't hate him," Sharon shot back. "I am furious at him, but I don't hate him. Dawn, you can't judge him as harshly as you do, you don't understand everything that he's been through. His wife died in his arms with his baby crying in the next room. He sat there with her body for hours because he couldn't bear to have the mortuary take her away. Do you understand what it would be like to go through something like that? Do you?"

"He…held her?" Logan asked, clutching my hands.

"Yes. He told me about that day after Mary Anne's heart attack. I mean, you have to know, his wife's death was horrific. She was in so much pain in the end, she used to scream all night, he said, but she didn't want to wake Mary Anne, so she would lock herself in the bathroom and bury her face in a pillow. He watched her dying, he watched her die, and then he was left with a baby who already looked exactly like her mother," Sharon said, reaching forward for the cake and pushing it in front of Logan and me. "If I close my eyes and picture that happening with Jack when Dawn was a baby? I don't know how I could have kept going."

Dawn looked at me. "Do we forgive him now?"

"No," I sighed, sinking slightly against Logan. "But we can understand."

"I think that you're a goddess for being so cool about him and his issues with his first wife," Stacey told Sharon. "I'd be all, See ya, call me when you're not so wrapped up in her."

"He's not," Sharon protested. "He only gets this way about Alma when it comes to Mary Anne. He loves me," she added, and she glowed brighter than the firelight of the candles. "He loves me, he loves our children. That's enough."

I slipped my head over Logan's shoulder, and he edged his eyes over to me. Yes, it was, I thought, as he moved his face into something that shadowed a smile.

Sharon gestured at the cake. "Come on, guys. Blow out the candles and make a wish."

I stared at the small wax sticks, how they had drooped down into stubs but still were lit, shining fast in the receding sunshine of the room. I glanced at Logan, and I felt him inhale, drawing a breath that felt like my own. I closed my eyes and bent forward with his body, and we sent a puff of air across the fire, sending its smoke tumbling across the table. When I kissed him, I caught some of that smoke in my body, congealing in my lungs and making me shiver.

I hated the feel of smoke inside of me. It felt dirty. It felt like death.

I didn't ask what he wished for. If you say it, it won't come true. I swallowed my wish back against my tongue, down away from where it would become words. _I want to live_.

Those words swung low into my body and hovered there around my heart, haloing it like light.

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"So, okay, I thought I could give you guys a full tour of campus," I announced, locking my car.

"Uh, that's cool, but I'm sorry, I'm not that interested in Duke. Just show me where the, um, Social Sciences Building is, and we'll call it a day," Stacey proposed, glancing down at a piece of paper while slinging her bag over her shoulder.

"That's no fun at all—but! Oh, that's good, that's right next to the Psych building," I brightened, pointing Stacey and my sister from the parking lots to the road. "We can show Stace to her class, and then I can pick up my work for Dr. Montalbano."

"Dude. It's called summer _vacation_," Dawn moaned, shaking my shoulders. "Do you understand this?"

"I love my work," I whined. "And I get paid ten bucks an hour to compile the data. Ten bucks—"

"Is, like, three beers," Dawn calculated. "Bitchin'. Okay, I take back my complaints. I don't know, I just need time to decompress after this past semester. My head is just throbbing with knowledge. It requires rest, relaxation, and hot guy therapy."

"Did you want to see a psychologist while you're here?" I asked, turning up the road to towards the Chapel. "I mean, I see somebody wonderful, Sarah? I can get you—and you, Stace—someone if you want to talk."

Stacey smiled. "That's very sweet, but I'm okay. I stopped therapy back in December, and it's been going good. I still get a little gun-shy with opening up to guys and stuff, but Dr. Frale, my shrink, said that would be normal for awhile. Imagine that, a rape victim with guy issues." She adjusted her sunglasses, hiding her eyes. From the way her chin jutted forward, I could almost see the steel of Stacey creeping through her body. Dawn said that she was different now—she seemed more playful, more fun, but she had only been around _us_ so far. Who knew if that would hold?

Dawn gave me a long look, tipping her face towards the sun. "I might take you up on that," she answered. "I want to make sure that I'm a good support network for you, May. I'm not going to be like your dad, I want you to trust that."

"I do," I said, taking her hand. "I trust you. We need to have a date night once a week again."

"Oh, let me come along," Stacey begged, grabbing Dawn's hand. "I can be a sister, too."

I tapped my finger on my chin. "Well, maybe. But, you could keep Logan company, you know? You two could become best friends!"

"Negative," Stacey laughed. She frowned, though, and added, "Is he okay? He, like, disappeared yesterday after lunch. He's not still hung up on what Richard said, is he?"

"What, that he'll end up like my dad? No," I replied, breaking off a leaf from a maple tree. I shredded it carefully along its veins, tossing the rips on the ground like a green snow. "He's just freaking over starting work today. Nothing calms him down more than locking himself in the library and the gym. I'm pretty sure he's worn a hole through the ceramic models at the dental school, and Shawn was whining that Logan was a real dick during their pick-up game—so he's normal," I grinned. I flicked the stem to the ground and plucked a wildflower next.

As I tore off a petal, Dawn rolled her eyes. "You know, if I didn't know for a fact that he was getting some every night, I'd say he was in greater need of getting laid than anyone I know. Maybe he should get plowed at a party."

"Yes, Dawnie, that's the solution to everything—get wasted," I declared, tossing the flower in the air.

"Works for me," she shrugged,

The closer we came to the Chapel, a couple of students came into sharper focus, both of them clutching cardboard coffee cups. The girl turned her face to the road, and she began to wave, her entire body undulating from the motion.

"Welcome to Duke, California girls!" she yelled as we approached the steps.

Stacey glanced at me. "We know her?" she asked in a low voice.

"Yes," I giggled. "That's Erin, my old roommate. No, Stacey, random people know that you're from California."

She held out her arms, turning them upside down to show off the uniform color of brown sugar skin. "Well, maybe," she huffed.

Erin skipped over, tossing her arms around me. "Hey, May," she squealed, holding me tight. "How's married life gone so far?"

"Oh, it's a blast," I rolled my eyes. "A bundle of joy, as it were."

The guy kicked me in the shins, a gentle breeze of contact. "And I wasn't invited, why?" he demanded, shaking the cup in my face.

I pouted, putting my head on his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Jer, we really wanted to keep it private. Like, we needed two witnesses, so we got two witnesses and that was it, just Erin and Shawn." I wound my fingers with his. "Forgive me?"

Jeremy reached over to touch my face, planting a kiss on my lips. "I suppose," he sighed, plucking one of my curls and sending it bouncing against my forehead. I giggled, kissing him again before stealing his coffee for a sip.

Dawn's eyes popped open. "Cheating on Logan already? Excellent," she laughed.

"No," I protested. "This is my Jeremy—we met on our very first day of Psych 102, and we've both been on Dr. Montalbano's undergrad research team. He's my favorite gay," I grinned.

"I'm your only gay," he snapped. "I am the Anthony to your Charlotte. Don't ever forget that, Ms. Spier."

"Mrs. Bruno now," Dawn snorted.

"No, never," I said, shaking my finger. "I'm keeping my last name. I'm already published as Spier—besides, I'm the last Spier," I added, looking down at the cup in my hands. I clenched it so hard that the cardboard heat ring buckled a bit. I stared at the brown ridges there, running my diamond over them so that a dull clicking noise spiraled up.

My father. He was following me. Sharon had come by yesterday to have dinner with us. We didn't speak about Dad once, but he was the ghost in the machine, lingering like steam over the food, over our mouths. In me.

"Screw Richard," Dawn announced. "So, hi, I'm the sister." She held out her hand to Erin and Jeremy.

Stacey looked at me after she introduced herself to my friends. "So," she said, clapping her hands. "Point me to the econ department. I must find my people."

"You never said Stacey was a nerd," Erin murmured to me. "Econ?"

Her blonde hair spiraling around her head, Stacey turned to glare at us. "I'll have you know that economics is what drives the world. Money, my friends. The possession and acquisition of money. Economics is the machine that drives currency and the markets and that dictates who has the cash and therefore, who has the power. You're telling me that power is a thing for _nerds_?" she demanded, thrusting her hands on her hips.

Jeremy gaped at her, stammering, "I'm scared that if I say no, you'll hit me."

"No, I'm the violent one," Dawn reassured him, squinching her eyes together. "Stacey will just make your life a living hell."

"I think I love you," Erin gushed. "Let's be best friends."

Dawn linked her arm with Erin's. "Come with me, girl. May says you're a chemistry major? You want to make alternatives to gasoline? I think I want to be _your _best friend."

The two of them began to chat; I watched them, Dawn's tall, strong frame bumping against Erin's large figure, the softness of her round body. For two years, I had listened to Erin complain about her weight, but she was so lovely, her glowing smile, the knowing sharpness in her eyes when she stared at me, at her textbooks, at everyone who walked in her life. The way she could barrel onto a dance floor and shake every inch of herself with a boldness that caught in my throat. She would cry over boys who would sleep with her and ignore her in the daylight, and I would put my arm around her, declaring them to be assholes, jerks, ignorant little boys. Because she was a force of beauty. Because I wanted to be her, I wanted to be like her, this brilliant electric person. The way she filled a room with her heart.

She wasn't Barbara—no one was—but she was close enough to shove that loneliness down. She wasn't Emily and Miranda, but she was enough. More—before we knew each other, she accepted me. The first time she caught a glimpse my bare battled chest, she blinked once and shrugged.

I loved her so much, this stranger in my room, in that moment, I cried into the ball of my shirt. So she wouldn't see—Erin didn't know about my crybaby past, the Mary Anne I had fought out of my body and out of my life. The weak girl, the meek girl, the Mary Anne with pigtails and a shadowed heart.

No: Erin was best friends with _May_, a strong girl. A woman. Someone new in the swirl of heat of the South. May had survived cancer, May had walked out of fire. May had died and come back.

I touched my still-flat belly—what else could May do?

"So," Jeremy said, trailing with me behind the two blondes and the dark head of my old roommate, "we thought we'd take the Cali girls to coffee at the Mad Hatter while you're at the doctor. And then you and Logan can join us? Have lunch?"

"He might have to go back to work, but I'll definitely be there," I told him, grinning. "How's work been this morning?"

"Awesome," he gushed. "The new batch of dream journals is out of this world. You're gonna have a blast cataloguing them. Though, not to toot my own horn, I think I analyzed them pretty damn well."

"I bet," I rolled my eyes. "I'll wager you dinner that I disagree with you on, oh, ten of them."

"You are so on," he laughed, bumping my hip. We walked together down the stone path, passing by a large hulk of a building before approaching the home of the economics department. For a moment, I had to close my eyes, breathing in the sweet early summer air, the way it was crisp with the promise of heat and the steamy scent of flowers blooming in the sticky bake of the morning. This was my home, I thought, staring at the clumps of students bustling around the campus, their arms thick with books and eagerness, arms full of a need to know.

I crossed my own arms over my chest, pressing against my heart. Yes, this is where I belonged.

Stay here. Stay _here_.

We led Stacey to her classroom, a medium-sized room with plush chairs set around a square oak table, its brown surface pockmarked with years of use. She sat in one of the chairs and rested her elbows on the armrests.

"Why yes, Dr. Collins—okay, I'll call you _Henry_, if you insist—I do think that IMF loan security has allowed Latin American governments to warp their governance schemata in light of long-term debt structuring," Stacey chirped, pushing her hair out of her face.

"Is she high?" Erin hissed. "Schemata? Isn't that bleeding from the hands?"

I giggled, giving her a shove as Stacey burrowed a furious glance at us. "My shrink says that positive imagery is one of the most important steps in actualizing your desires," Stacey sniffed, her gaze pillowing the room in a soft want. "You'd think that you two would understand that," she added, glaring at Jeremy and me.

He held up his hands. "Listen, John Nash, I didn't say a damned thing."

"Good," she nodded, narrowing her eyes at everyone except Dawn. For her, Stacey beamed. "I am so excited!" she gushed, standing up and seizing Dawn's hands.

"I know," Dawn smiled, ruffling Stacey's hair. "See? This was worth Oklahoma."

"Don't get too far ahead of yourself," Stacey retorted, recoiling. She took a deep breath and circled her eyes around the room once more. "Okay, I'm cool. We can go."

We walked out of the Social Sciences Building and headed next door to where the psychology department was. I pointed out all of my classrooms, my professors' offices while Dawn and Stacey wrenched looks of patient interest on their faces. They were trying, weren't they, I thought, my body warming over. Back in high school, Stacey would have been groaning and Dawn would be tipping her mouth into her best friend's ear, whispering something that would make them both dissolve into laughter. Secrets.

They had changed. Or, they were just being nice to their poor sick sisterfriend. Maybe both. Still, it was different. They were different.

And they were mine. I took Dawn's hand and pulled her into the department office. "This is my mailbox," I gushed, touching the undergraduate research bin. "I have to share it with Jeremy and two other girls? But this is where they leave my work." I pulled out a note in Jeremy's handwriting that directed me to a large cardboard box under the shelves; I struggled to gather it in my arms.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, do you have any upper body muscle?" Dawn snapped, taking it from my shaking grip. "Besides, lady with baby shouldn't be overdoing it, right?"

"I don't know," I stuttered. "I…I don't know what I'm supposed to do or not do."

Dawn shifted the box onto her hip like a large child and sighed. "Oh, Mary Anne."

"What?" I whispered, shrinking back.

Dawn stared at me. "You look like you're expecting me to hurt you. Shit, sis, are you really okay with what your dad did? God damn it, stupid Logan. I wish I could turn back the clock and give him fifty bucks to punch Richard. I don't care what Mom says. Richard should have taken these years to get square with himself, you know? I've gotten healthy, Stacey's gotten healthy, you and Logan and ready to rock with whatever happens, and Mom's just rad. He's the only one who has refused to change," Dawn realized, wrinkling her upper lip.

"He held my dead mother for hours," I murmured, leaning against the mailboxes. "Dad never really got over that. Sharon's right—he's like Stacey. It took her years to get help."

"Yeah, well, Richard has had nearly twenty years, you know?" she replied, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear. With the short hair, her chin was so firm, a triangle that made her mouth an unending stretch of red. Dawn's face was a sharp thing, all of the features hard and defined as if made from stone. The cloud of light, the layers of that hair, buffered it into something soft, but there was a challenge in her face. It was something that would slam you down.

She had hurt me before. She had abandoned me. She had asked me to die.

I swallowed that down, staring at my sister, the flash of anger in her eyes. I stared at her, willing my words to calm her down. "No, not really," I countered. "Dad's had three years to deal—from the moment I was diagnosed with cancer the first time. It took Stacey about three years to deal with her stuff, and even then, we had to force her to accept it. Maybe it's the same for Dad. I'm not defending him—or, no, I'm not apologizing for him," I corrected, pushing my fingers through my hair. They caught on the curls, yanking hard at my scalp.

My sister sighed. "Whatever. I'm just worried. You're taking on a lot, and your dad is worthless. You're gonna see your therapist soon, right?"

"Yeah, I see her Thursday," I nodded. "It's just a lot of adjustment. I mean, the week before, to the best of my knowledge, I was healthy and not pregnant. And I was only a girlfriend. It's like, I have to remind myself, oh, you're sick. Oh, you're married, oh, you're pregnant. It's just a lot to keep straight," I mumbled, pulling my fingers out of my hair. I glanced at her. "Don't worry about me, Dawnie. I know to ask for help when I need it."

"Good," she replied, slapping her hand against her hip. "Come on, this thing is heavy. What's in it, a dead body?"

I stiffened for a moment, looking down my own frame and glancing at the box. _Stop it_. "No, it's the dream journals from our research project. We're studying the correlation between dream images and actual behavior in bipolar subjects. It's pretty wild," I said, my fingers tingling back with life.

"Crazy people?" Dawn said, flinching. "Wow, okay."

"I went crazy once," I murmured, holding the door of the department open for us.

"Not like this," Dawn insisted, tapping a finger on the box. "Never like this. Don't ever say something like that again, May, understand me?"

I ducked my head, feeling a heat rise in my cheeks. I did, I really did, but I wanted her to know that it didn't mean that I wasn't looking over these journals with a veil of sympathy in my eyes. I knew what it was like to lose control.

But I knew how to get it back. Remember that, Mary Anne. Remember that.

Jeremy took the box from my sister, holding it in his thick arms. "My pleasure," he smiled at me. "Just a bit of light reading."

"Right?" I laughed, directing us to the stairwell and back down out of the building.

"So, where is the Student Health Center?" Stacey asked glancing back to where the Chapel loomed, its spires bounding up to the sun.

I pointed to the gigantic complex next to the psych building. "Convenient, huh?"

"Indeed," Stacey nodded. She put her arm around my waist. "You scared?"

"Nope. Are you? I mean, a graduate seminar, Stace. That's a lot to jump in to," I noted, rubbing her back.

Stacey laughed, "Oh, are you kidding? I've been so pumped for this since Dr. Collins suggested it last fall. That, and I'm really happy to spend some time with you. Though—I'll admit a lot of it is because Dawn's excited to be with you for a while. Not that I'm not," she added with a desperate lick on her tongue. "But, she misses you in a special way, you know?"

"I do," I said, reaching up and touching her hair. It was long—not as long as Dawn's had been, but still it had a mass and shape that reminded me of my sister's old amazing mane. As she walked, her shirt rode up from her skirt, and I could see the bright glint of yellow on her skin, the tattoo of a lighthouse surrounded by a curl of a blue wave. A light—my sister. Dawn had guided Stacey through the suffocating dark before.

And she was here for me now. I needed her as much as Stacey did. Does. Shine on me, my sister, I thought, hugging myself close to her best friend.

Sharp against the gray walls of the South Hospital was my husband in his blue scrubs, his cell phone pressed to his ear as he kneaded his forehead. I could hear his voice, tight and annoyed as we grew closer to the entrance to the student clinic.

"No—no—well, I don't much care what you think," he smarmed, moving his eyes from me to the ground. "Well, that's just too bad for you, huh? I mean, you should have asked me before telling everyone and their second cousin that there was a kegger at _my house_ on Friday, yeah?"

Dawn gasped and grabbed the phone out of Logan's hand. "Hi, who is this?...Shawn, hi, this is Dawn. So, what is this, a kegger?...Really…_Really_…Oh, I know, he's so unfun," Dawn laughed, reaching out and slapping Logan on the shoulder. "Oh, no, I think that sounds fantastic! Here, hold on." Dawn covered the mouthpiece with her hand and looked at me with syrupy eyes. "Maaaay," she began, rushing over to me and putting her head on my shoulder.

"Say no," Logan declared. "No, no, absolutely no. Shawn emailed the whole team saying that _we_ were hosting a party on Friday as, like, a wedding thing. Which is codeword for, his apartment is too small and so he's gonna use our place and trash it. No way."

"Siiiister," Dawn sang, looping an arm around my shoulders. "I want to have a party. I want to meet Lee's hot friends. Please, please, if you love me, we party."

"Oh, come on, May," Erin pleaded. "It sounds like fun." Jeremy and Stacey nodded eagerly. I looked over at the pained expression on Logan's face, but I couldn't help it. My sister felt so warm on my skin, how could I say no to her?

"I'm fine with it," I shrugged, and Dawn hooted. Erin wrapped her arms around me, too, and the two of them made me jump with them in excitement, bouncing up and down in front of the clinic steps with a buoyancy that almost worked its way under the fear building in my stomach while I looked at the clinic.

"It's on," Dawn announced into the phone. "Call us later, okay?...Sure! Yeah! Sounds good, I can't wait to meet you, too…What? Yeah, she's here—okay, I will. Bye, Shawn." Dawn glanced over at Erin and said, "Shawn says to tell you hi."

Erin blushed, rolling her eyes. "He's just pissed that I schooled him at your wedding, May."

"Right," I scoffed, walking away from her and to the scowling boy on the bench. "Oh, come on, you can't be that angry, can you?"

He gave me a withering look, and I tried to touch him, but he batted me away. "Don't give me your pity kiss," he grumped, pulling up his legs in front of his chest, barricading himself behind his body.

I looked his clothes over. "I don't see any blood—that's a good sign, right?"

His face melted into a smile, and he put his legs down on the ground. "It was awesome," he gushed, grabbing my hands. "It was Me, two, Dental Mishaps, zero. I didn't fuck up or anything. And, and? Coach D said that usually his daughter howls the entire time she's getting her teeth cleaned, and she was great for me. That, and Dr. Vessick let me walk him through the dental overview at the end of the cleaning—and he said I was perfect. Pretty sweet, huh?" he beamed.

I opened my arms up, and he swept in, swinging me off my feet. "I knew you would be terrific," I declared, rubbing his back.

"I know, but I was…just, well, until the moment I was there, it was kinda nerve wracking. But then, the moment I started working on Coach D, it was like, I knew exactly what to do. It was…just really good," he sighed, squeezing me tight. "This is a good day. Well, except for the unexpected kegger."

"Unexpected Kegger is so the name of my band." Jeremy laughed, putting the box down on the concrete. "Is that your car? I'll put this in there, if you want."

"Thanks—are you coming over to dinner tomorrow? I'm trying to redeem myself for last week," Logan winced. "I swear, this time I won't screw up. My sister is totally going to walk me through it."

"You mean the Great Spaghetti Massacre of aught-nine?" Jeremy laughed, taking the keys from Logan's hand.

Dawn exploded into laughter, sagging against Stacey. "You fucked up spaghetti?" she gasped. "Oh, that's _fantastic_. I'm totally telling Lewis that."

"You know what? I'm in such a great mood, I don't care," Logan retorted, putting me back on the ground and wrapping the flat of his arms against my chest. "Ask Lew about his great attempt at doing laundry from his freshman year, huh? Then we can talk about who's 'fantastic' around here."

Stacey wiped her eyes. "I don't know. Laundry is tricky. Spaghetti is boiling water, Lee. That's redefining pathetic."

"It was very complicated," I insisted, but I grimaced, and Erin choked on a laugh. The three girls collapsed into giggles again, but I twisted my head back and kissed the bottom of Logan's chin. "I'm on your side," I told him.

"I'm so sure," he said, tightening his face in suspicion. "Anyway, ready to head in?"

"I guess," I shrugged. "I don't want to be late. I bet we have to fill out a billion papers here, too."

I was right: there were three clipboards worth of forms to fill out. Mother's history, Father's history. Our hands paused there over those lists: mother and father. That was us, wasn't it? It was strange to see that, to know that. I huddled into the line of Logan's side, curling my legs up under me as his right arm banded across my shoulders like a thing of steel, gripping me in. I slid my arm behind his back, doodling into the papery feel of the scrubs in the valley of his spine.

It was odd to see him filling out these forms with me. Usually, he just bent his head on top of mine, reading out information from my day planner for me to put to paper or reminding me of little details. My sickness had seeped into him, too: he could recall dates and events as fast as I could.

February 26, 2006. The day I died. That one, he knew by heart.

"I didn't know you had diabetes in your family," I said, watching him check that box and fill in _maternal grandmother_.

"My mom's mom," he nodded, scratching his head absently. "My Nana."

"Have you spoken to her at all lately?" I asked.

He snorted, "Are you kidding? She and Papa sent me and Kerry and Hunt Christmas presents again, and we tossed them in the ocean. Until they get over their issues with Mom, we're not going to speak to her or anyone on that side of the family, period. It's like, why do they think we're going to side with them? Against Mom and Dad? Get real," he snapped, checking off the box for deafness. _Cousin_.

"What will they do if I…if I get an abortion?" I whispered, looking up at him.

He shrugged. "Well, first, I'm not telling them. It's none of their business. But if I did, they'd probably flip their shit again. But whatever, you know? If they want to get into a pissing contest over Biblical intent, they can go ahead and do it. I'm comfortable with my God, and if their idea of God and mine don't overlap? Then fine. It's not like I was clambering to hang out in Mississippi anyway, right?"

Gnawing on his lip for a moment, he opened his mouth once, twice, and then finally said, "If we do decide—to end this? I'm going to want to talk to my priest, though. Will you be okay with that? You met Father Joseph, he's really cool. I'd want to talk it out with him before we did it."

"Of course," I said, nudging his face to mine. We kissed, and I became aware of the other people in the waiting room. The half-dozen others in here, slumped in hard plastic chairs, some scribbling on their own clipboards, some staring in boredom at the television bolted to the ceiling. They were all alone. There was a girl huddled up in a chair by the reception desk, wiping at her eyes as she filled out her information. Why was she here? Why was she alone?

I pressed my nose against Logan's clothes, breathing in the antiseptic smell of the scrubs, a faint line of fluoride and cinnamon from the polisher, the wave of ginger that clung to the almost invisible hair on his arms, the same white blonde as Dawn's head. It was odd, this sterile scent of his work. It would take getting used to.

"Tell me what your favorite part of your day was," I urged, watching him write down his mother's five miscarriages, the ancephaly. The birth defects. Was that why Hunter had such bad allergies, was he damaged somehow?

Logan clipped the pen back on the board; when he smiled, this shy thing that played on his mouth, he seemed so young, it seemed strange on his face. "When Dr. Vessick let me walk through the review. I mean, not to knock the hygienist job or anything, but what _he's_ doing? That's what I want," he said, his eyes shining, the color of July sky. "I'm gonna knock off a few of my observation hours this afternoon and watch him fill cavities and stuff. He's left-handed, too, so he's gonna show me, like—wait. This isn't boring you, right?" he asked.

"Hey, I just like to listen to the sound of your voice. Though, well, I still don't get how you can find this interesting, but I understand _why_, you obsessive freak," I giggled.

"Takes one to know one," he teased, kissing me again. His fingers circled the forms. "This doesn't feel real, pretty girl."

"I know," I sighed. I took his hand and laced it with mine over the papers. "Why did this happen to us?"

"Because we could handle it," he said. He suggested? He hoped.

"I guess," I answered, standing up to return the forms. We sat in silence for a while, just staring at the television, at each other.

"Tell me a secret," he asked, putting his face next to mine and drawing his nose against my own.

I rubbed the line between my lower lip and my chin. "Well," I said slowly, "yesterday? When Sharon came over, and Dad wasn't with her? I was glad. Wait, you know that. Oh, oh." I edged up closer to his ear. "I totally read the last Harry Potter book again yesterday after our lunch. I can't help myself. I love Ginny, she's my favorite character, so I skipped over all of the other parts just to read where she was in the story."

"Okay, you're a dork," he laughed, and I gave him a shove, curling my finger against his chest. I dipped my head a bit, and he took in a breath, the thoughts in his head making his eyes darken. "Well—this isn't really a secret, but when I saw you walking up with your little group just now? I couldn't stop staring at you. That smile of yours, I swear," he said, shaking his head. "Oh, that, and I had a song stuck in my head the whole time I worked on Coach D's daughter. But not the whole song—just the chorus to 'Carry On, My Wayward Son.' I cannot listen to the pep band's CD before work, for real."

I snickered. "Oh, angel, the secret there is that you listen to a pep band CD. That's really lame."

"It's motivation, thank you," he replied, tightening each word. "It reminds me of games, which makes me feel quite confident, and therefore capable. Shut up, I don't own any Britney Spears albums. You can hide it at the bottom of your CD case all you want, _Oops…I Did It Again_ is still there, pretty girl. For shame, yall."

I dropped my mouth, ready to protest, when a nurse called out my name. I took in a deep breath and led the way into the back rooms. It felt so routine, getting weighed, getting measured, getting my blood pressure measured. I had gained a pound over the weekend—or maybe this scale was different. Who knew. At least I was still five-five. That hadn't changed.

Not yet.

I exchanged my clothes for a gown, settling down on the exam table in the room. I stared at the metal stirrups at the end of the table, at the row of instruments shining a malicious silver in the mean fluorescent light. Logan scooted a chair over to the head of the table and rubbed my bare legs. The gown gaped over the front of my body, my scars peeking out, lining their truth out into the world. I was a scarred thing. I was a damaged thing. Admit it, Mary Anne, admit the fact that you aren't whole.

But if I did, Logan would tell me that he wasn't whole either. Filling the gaps in himself with books, brushes, and basketball. But not me—I didn't take up the empty space. I was a part of him like he was a part of me. What would happen to me if I lost him? I watched him bouncing his head to a song I couldn't hear—he looked so healthy, oversized to the point of exaggeration, this collection of long parts. When his lips touched my knee, making me shiver with heat, I closed my eyes and tried to see myself without him.

Nothing.

The paper over the table crackled as I shifted slightly, bracing my body with my hands as he kept working his mouth down my leg. It was so bland in here, just another doctor's office, just another doctor to tell me something that I didn't want to know. When did it stop registering with me, all of their words? When did they all start to look the same? White walls, popcorn-crackle ceilings, Bad places, bad news. That's all it was.

There was a knock at the door, and Logan straightened up. I grabbed his hand as the doctor walked in. "Hi, I'm Doctor Chaplin," the woman smiled, waving at us with the clipboard in her hand. "I'm your OB."

"Hi," we said back.

"How are you today?" she asked, walking over to us.

"Fine," we answered.

She blinked. "Do you two always talk in unison?"

"No," we said. But then I snickered, and he and the doctor laughed.

She perched on the edge of the table. "Well, okay. We had the lab run tests on your blood on Friday, so you don't need any drawn today. There are a few things that we need to add—with the history of ancephaly on…your side," she said, looking up from the forms at Logan, "we need to do a triple screen. We look for certain proteins in your blood…Mary Beth? No, crap, Mary Anne, sorry," she winced, slapping her forehead.

"It's okay," I told her.

"My sister's name is Mary Beth, you have to forgive me," she blushed. She was young, the pink in her cheeks covering up a maze of freckles on her cheeks and nose. With her hair back in a ponytail and the pink blouse under her white coat, she looked fresh out of a sorority house, not medical school. Great. A resident, probably. They were always an adventure, their ability stretching between their knowledge and their confidence levels. And this was the person who was going to hand me the information I needed, _we_ needed.

Wonderful.

"Anyway, a triple screen," Dr. Chaplin repeated. "It looks for evidence of birth defects and abnormalities in neural development—spina bifida, Down's Syndrome, and ancephaly, among other problems. Plus it can pick up problems in organ development, like kidneys and the liver. It's a combination of checking the levels of alpha-fetoprotein, and maternal serum, which are the hormones estriol and human chorionic gonadotropin. Okay? Your baby excretes these into your bloodstream, and we're able to measure and see if the levels are too high or too low. But, if we can test or not yet depends on what week you're in. And from what Dr. Wilks has noted, that's the most important thing for us to find out," she said, scanning her finger over my file.

"When can you do an amnio?" I asked.

She tipped her hand back and forth. "As early as week thirteen, though we can really nail everything in week sixteen. I know that time is critical for you, so we'd try to get that in as soon as possible." She licked her lips and put her hand on my shoulder. "I know that termination is a possibility here. If that's what you decide, we can get you lined up for that procedure as soon as possible at a clinic either in Durham or Chapel Hill—we don't perform abortions here."

"Okay," I mumbled, looking down at my hands. My school didn't want that stain, did it.

"First and foremost, how are you feeling?" Dr. Chaplin asked, pressing her lips together. "Tired? Migraines, aches and pains, swelling, nausea or vomiting?"

I shook my head. "Nothing that would have tipped me off, you know? I've been tired, but, I mean, it was finals and moving from my dorm into a house and stuff. It was stressful. That, and I had this cough? It turned out to be a tumor that was aggravating my lung, and I was coughing up blood—well, anyway…oh, my God, I had to go under local anesthesia for my biopsy. Did that hurt the ba—the fetus? And I drink a cup of coffee every day. And I'm on Effexor for depression. Have I totally hurt it already?" I panicked, Logan stood up and put his arms around me, rubbing his hands on my back until my breath began to come out in a normal pace again. It was all moving too fast, too fast, over my tongue and my body and my head. Look at all of the things that I had been doing wrong. Look at how I fail.

Just like my father said.

"Relax, okay?" Dr. Chaplin soothed, touching my knee. "Local anesthesia isn't a real risk to a developing fetus. They used lidocaine; it's not something I'd like to see you do again without speaking to me first, but the risk is very low. It's okay. With the coffee, a cup won't kill you, but you really do want to avoid caffeine. As for the Effexor—you need to stop that now. Like tomorrow, toss 'em out. Make an appointment with your shrink and talk about alternatives, but you have to quit the meds. There aren't enough studies on the drug and its effect on pregnancy, but one of the suspicions is that increases the risk of miscarriage. So unless you want to lose this baby, stop," she ordered.

I drooped, sagging down against Logan. I had been on this medicine since I was fourteen. It had saved me—it had _saved_ me from the dark depths of my own mind. Quit it? Just like that?

Should I? I closed my eyes and swam for a moment in the dark sink of this confusion. A baby that could save me. Medicine that did. Which one, which one do I choose?

Dr. Chaplin cleared her throat, and Logan slunk back down into his chair, taking my hand in both of his, cradling it there. "Well, let's find out the answer to the ten thousand dollar question: how far along are you? First, do you have any clue? It says you were spotting on March 15th. Spotting for a day or for a few days?"

"Just that one day," I said, closing my eyes, picturing the blood on the white hotel sheets, a cardinal color on the snow stretch of that bed.

"Had you had sex that day or the night before?" she asked.

A blush burst out of my body, ratcheting my face into something blotchy and embarrassed. "Um, the night before and, and both the nights before that," I mumbled.

"That was right before I left, wasn't it?" he asked, wincing. His eyes flickered on the doctor and then back down to my feet.

"Oh, a going away present for the NCAAs?" she laughed. "Didn't help you guys too much, did it?" He scowled at her as she started scribbling on the chart. "Well, it's hard to say. My guess? You were probably building up to start your period again at the end of March, and you probably got pregnant that first night that you two were together—the spotting was probably your body freaking out a bit from actually having to go to work down there again," she said, twisting her mouth up a bit in thought.

So she had foot-in-mouth disease—at least she seemed to know what she was doing. I nodded, tightening my fingers between Logan's. I could feel the pressure of his wedding ring against my palm, and I let it bite into me.

Dr. Chaplin looked at my abdomen, rolling her hands over my skin. "How are your jeans fitting?" she asked.

"I had to switch into my high school jeans—well, my ones from before the cancer," I said. "I mean, in the past three weeks, I've been hungrier? Eating more—like snacking between meals, too. I don't really do that. I just figured that I was getting healthier, I was actually excited," I sighed.

"Me, too," Logan mumbled, putting his chin on the table. "I thought Mary Anne was finally back to normal."

"Well, your skin is beginning to elasticize," Dr. Chaplin explained. "It's stretching a bit. You wouldn't start showing until the second trimester, right before that, so I'd assume that you're not there yet." She clapped her hands once and then set the file aside. "Okay. I need to get a nurse, and we're going to do a physical exam, take a Pap smear, and see what we can determine. We might go ahead today and do a sonogram, see if we can find a heartbeat. Fetal heartbeat is another way to determine the week you're in, so, yeah, I'll be right back."

The moment she slipped out of the door, I burst into tears. "She wants me to off my meds," I sobbed, grabbing the V-neck of Logan's shirt. "What do I do without my meds?"

"You'll be okay," he murmured, putting his hands on the back of my head. "You'll call Eddie back in Stoneybrook, and he'll get you set, you know that. It's okay, I promise, you'll be okay. You have Sarah, you can go back to seeing her once a week, twice a week if you have to, right? This isn't the end of the world," he said.

"How do you know?" I snapped. "You weren't there back before I went on my meds. I went batshit crazy, Logan. Just ask Claudia Kishi, she'll love to tell you how nuts I got. I can't do that again."

I felt him take his glasses off; I heard the click of metal on the plastic surface of the counter and then his head pressed against mine. Pushing my hands under his shirt, I rested my fingers on the ribs that hid his heart. The rattle of his pulse stole into my skin, and I kept breathing, waiting for myself to take that beat and wrap myself around it. After a minute, my body unwound, and I sank against him.

"I'm sorry," I murmured, kissing his neck. I flicked my tongue against his skin, feeling him shift under my hands. "I'm so scared, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he shrugged. "I'm aware of your anger issues."

"I love you so much," I told him, pressing my hands against him so he would step away, and then pulling him back in to my face. I let my hands run over his head, his shoulders. We were still kissing, my legs wrapping around his waist, when the door opened again.

"Sorry, yall, this ain't no dorm room," Dr. Chaplin laughed. "You ready to go, Mary—Anne?"

_No_. I nodded, scooting myself back on the table and lying down, the paper protesting as I put my full body on it. "So, okay," Dr. Chaplin said, pulling a stool over to the foot of the table. "Let's start with something you know—a breast exam."

"Like there's something to examine," I muttered as she drew back the gown. Her fingers coursed over the ravaged place where my breasts should be, pressing into the hint of tissue. She circled around like a scythe, searching for something that shouldn't be there. Or maybe it should—maybe my body was built for cancer, and health was the aberration. Still, she pulled her hands away and pronounced me normal.

Whatever that means.

Dr. Chaplin asked me to put my legs in the stirrups; I shifted down, pressing my heels against the metal cove for my feet. She put her hands on my hips and urged me down an inch; I tried not to recoil from her touch. With a snap, she secured the latex gloves on her hands, and she positioned herself between the tent of my legs.

"Alright, this shouldn't be too bad," she shrugged. "You've had these before, right?"

"Yeah," I answered. Still, it's different when your boyfr—_husband_ is sitting next to your, his head on your chest as he stares at you and kisses the soft skin under your chin. And you wrap the hand with your rings on his face and try to decide: do I want this pregnancy to be far along? Or not?

Do I want to have this ended or not? Answer me, tell me.

I love knowing things, but the idea of hearing _this_ had frozen me in terror.

I focused in on Logan's eyes and not the feel of the cold metal prongs sliding into my body. My right hand drifted up to the necklace that rested in the hollow of my throat, the bunch of rubies and the single blue topaz that gleamed almost as bright as those eyes when he looked at me. I forced myself to smile at him so I could see that mirror that surfaced in his face—the way his jaw loosened, his neck slipping down rippling his shoulders into a sink. The slackness around his mouth, just sinking into a gentle thing that wanted to touch me.

Sometimes, I would see my body in a mirror. How thin I looked, how scrawny and worn, the network of marred skin of my torso. I was ugly under my clothes. But I was beautiful in those eyes, always.

Even in a dingy green gown. Even with cancer, even with something creeping larger in me that would kick his life off course. He had been wounded before, and the funny, sweet, bullheaded boy from middle school retreated, warped and shifted but somehow the same under it all. Don't let me hurt him, too, I prayed. He's worked so hard to be this man, don't let me be the one to break him.

He smiled back at me. _Britney_, he grimaced. I giggled and pinched his ear as the pressure in my belly made me wince. Her fingers inside of me made me queasy, and I gagged, pressing my hand against my mouth. "I'm looking for how large your uterus has expanded, Mary Anne, the size of the pelvic organs." Dr. Chaplin explained. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I grit, pitching my eyes up to the ceiling. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," the nurse told me. "Let us know if it hurts, though."

I nodded, shifting my eyes back down to my husband. He put his hands on the side of my face and stroked my cheeks as Dr. Chaplin rolled her hands over my lower belly, her fingers still poking away between my legs.

"Alright," the doctor said. "Let's get this Pap smear done."

Sighing, I raised my eyebrows at Logan and mouthed back, _It's a perfectly fine album. Shut up._

_Give me a pep band any day over ho music,_ he replied, sticking out his tongue.

_It's not ho music! Just because she's a skank doesn't mean—_

The crumple of the rubber gloves startled us. Dr. Chaplin stood up and made a note on my file. "I'm thinking…six to eight weeks, but...well. Let's see if we can detect a heartbeat since that's a good way to check, okay?" She looked at both of us and smiled. "What are you studying, Mary Anne?" She nudged my feet out of the stirrups but kept my gown open.

"Psychology with a minor in rhetoric and composition—I love words," I said, tucking my head against my neck. "I love Duke, it's been awesome."

"And you're from Connecticut? Like, Greenwich? Posh City and stuff?" she laughed as the nurse pulled a large white machine from the wall and over to the table.

"If posh means boring," Logan grumbled. "Everyone's always in a rush up there to do just about nothing."

"See? This is what I'm saying. We Southerners appreciate the moments, you know? So much happens when you just watch. In the South, the best day is a Sunday on the porch with a big pitcher of lemonade and a barbeque in the evening," Dr. Chaplin announced, spreading her hands in front of her body as if she was carrying a tray.

"That's what I've been trying to tell her for years!" Logan exclaimed. "Mary Anne? These are my people."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," I laughed, giving his head a push. "You are so silly. Like you need a reason to hang out in the hammock all day with a book."

"Or better yet," Dr. Chaplin added, "a Saturday with the full ESPN package of SEC football games—and Auburn against the Tide as the nightcap," she gushed, walking over the machine.

Logan pointed at her. "That's my dream woman, right there. SEC football and an appreciation of lemonade. Take notes, pretty girl."

"Wrong," I laughed as Dr. Chaplin pressed a strange instrument that looked like a microphone to the space above my pelvic bone.

She snapped on the machine, and I listened to the wooshing noise of the static, its struggle to focus in and find the fetus. "This can pick up the heartbeat as early as eight weeks, sometimes seven," she explained. "If I don't hear anything, I'm saying you're at week six. If I do, we'll say seven."

I nodded, bearing down at the crackling, creeping noise of the machine. Logan crinkled his mouth in a confused way as we waited, hearing something and nothing as Dr. Chaplin rolled the microphone-shaped stylus over my abdomen.

And then: a swoop of a beat. Fluttering, kicking itself into loudness. It sounded like the fluttering of legs against thick blankets, it was so swift and delicate.

"Is it supposed to be that fast?" Logan asked, sitting up so he could look at Dr. Chaplin.

The nurse raised her eyebrows, glancing down at the chart. "Well, that explains it," she said to Dr. Chaplin who nodded back.

"Well, no," the doctor answered, tilting her head back down towards the speaker on the machine. She exhaled hard, and a smile crept over her lips. The smile of being right.

She clicked off the machine. "Well, Mary Anne, your body was so excited to start menstruation, it got a bit overeager and overproduced."

"What?" I frowned.

"That's not a fast heartbeat," she told us. "That's _two_ heartbeats."


	5. Chapter 4

Thanks to the roommate, who went out of town for the weekend and said, "My computer is your computer."

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_Last night, I dreamed that I was a werewolf. I got out of bed and walked down the hall and suddenly I looked down at myself and I saw that I was no longer myself. I was this thing of hair and murder. So I left my house and prowled the neighborhood, and I ate at all of the dogs and cats in the town. But that wasn't enough. I went back to my house and I put my hands on my husband, and I sunk my teeth into his neck and ripped out his throat. The last thing I remember was touching my face with my werewolf hands and my paws slipping over all of his blood. My husband just lay there, staring at me with these horrible empty green eyes because I had killed him so quick and terribly, he didn't even have time to flinch._

I took the dream journal and threw it across the room. It slammed against the wall and flung down, the pages flapping like battered wings. When my hands covered my face, the room went dark. Dark like the night, a night prowled by monsters that killed the ones they loved.

I sighed, walking across the conference room and plucking the journal from the floor. It wasn't this woman's fault, Patient 27. It wasn't her fault that her words sunk into me like teeth. Patient 19 had described stabbing her husband with a knife forged from the metal from a car she had crashed into her house, killing her children under those out-of-control wheels.

Patient 6 had written under his dream, _Is this normal? Tell me, am I normal?_

I wasn't the person to ask.

Normal: it was normal for women to release multiple eggs for their first few menstrual cycles after extended menopause. It wasn't uncommon, it wasn't strange. Your body is excited, it chugs out eggs because it _can_ again, and sometimes it happens. Sometimes _they_ happen.

Normal: it was normal for pregnant women to obsess over their unborn children. Fetuses. That part of them that was them and not them.

Normal: it was normal for cancer patients to grapple with their own mortality. To struggle with depression, to struggle with their ability to survive.

So I was normal, wasn't I. Then why did I feel like my skin was rippling with an odd, sticky thing that turned me from Mary Anne into someone else, someone who stared back at me in the mirror with a shadow instead of a face? A Mary Anne I knew but didn't recognize.

She was supposed to have gone away, this girl of uncertainty and panic and fear.

Go away, _you_.

But she stayed.

I slapped the journal shut; I was getting nowhere. Packing up the journals back into the box, I glanced at the clock and decided, Eight hours was enough. The weight of the box made my shoulders sag, and the hard line of the bottom edge drove into my stomach. Did that hurt? Not me, _it._ Not it, _them_. The two almost-maybe-babies bouncing around in my belly. The not-abnormal growths of me and him. I hitched the box higher in my arms and edged the door open with my foot. A hand burst into the slowly widening gap between the door and the frame.

"Mary Anne," the department secretary laughed, "you should have asked for help."

"Sorry," I blushed.

She took the box from my arms; did I look that weak? "So, any big plans for the weekend? A Friday night party, perhaps?" she teased, putting the box back the psych department mailroom.

I blinked. "Did Jeremy say something?"

She laughed, "Oh, he's got a big mouth. Yesterday, he said he had to get his work done because May Spier was throwing a huge party on Friday night. And my invite got lost, I'd imagine…?" Her eyebrows arched up, and I had to laugh.

"Oh, I'm sure you'd love it," I told her, glancing at her wiry mound of gray hair, the prim snap of her cardigan, the rubber-wedged shoes on her feet. "I bet you'd kick off the round of body shots, right?"

"Naturally. At any rate, I hope you're not drinking—you're underage," she scolded, shaking her finger at me.

"You don't have to worry about that; I have only drank once since I came to college, and that was enough to turn me back off of alcohol again," I said. I lied. The misery of the tequila in January wasn't why I was abstaining. My hand drifted down to my belly, and I winced. Liar, liar.

The secretary smiled at me. Secretary, secret-ary. Secrets. Everywhere. Even inside of me.

When I arrived home, I parked my car behind Stacey's and sighed. I was hoping she and Dawn would be gone somewhere, flitting away the hours so that I could slip inside unnoticed. I had done a good job of avoiding the two of them all week. Save Tuesday night's dinner, we had collided paths only once—this morning as all four of us tried to use the bathroom at once in the morning.

"I have the most hair," Stacey argued, dashing inside while Dawn gave Logan and me a long, hard look. I could see her winding her mouth up, about to pepper us with questions, but I shuttled him back into our room, locking the door behind us.

It was none of their business, what happened at the clinic on Monday. I wished it were none of our business, too.

On Monday, Logan drove me back to my car; he kissed me and left for work. I watched him drive away, his face blank and whitened around his silent mouth. I went to lunch with my sister and Stacey and my best friends from Duke, and I chirped out, _I don't want to talk about it._

"But May—" Erin frowned.

"I said, I don't want to talk about it—I'm gonna go order a sandwich. And a scone, that sounds delicious," I said in a bright tone. The moment I stood from the table and turned away, my body stoned over, my smile breaking off like shale. That's how it was all week. Me, shooting bright smiles at my friends and changing the subject. Logan, keeping his mouth pressed in a quiet thing, murmuring excuses about work being overwhelming.

No one believed us. But they left us alone, at least. Even Dawn, her suspicious eyes curling over the two of us as we shuffled around the house. I came home each day from school and saw her and Stacey in the living room, in the kitchen, in the backyard playing with J.D., their heads bent together, popping apart when I walked in the room, smiling before I walked back out again.

I didn't want to drag them into this, too.

"When she is ready to talk to you, she will," I heard Stacey say on Tuesday, as they set the table for our dinner. "This doesn't mean that something bad happened. Just, maybe May's taking a page out of Lee's book—the whole, give me time to process shit book. It's a boring book. Maybe we should take her shopping. That always perks me up."

"No, something's up," Dawn muttered. "I can feel it."

Logan glanced at me, sliding in the pan of chicken into the oven. I grabbed his hand and lured him upstairs, kissing him on every step and then pushing him against the wall as I slid off his pants.

"Pretty girl," he sighed, curling his hands over my head as I worked my tongue on the crease of his thighs. "We should tell them."

"No," I told him. "We don't tell anyone until we know what to do." I slid my mouth over him, and I heard the dull thump of his head against the wall as I took away all of his words, the useless empty words, leaving him only with noises that rumbled below speech—and my name, over and over again, only my name.

And it was Friday now. And we still didn't know what to do. So we didn't talk.

The house was quiet except for the sound of water beating in the shower. I set the bags of groceries on the floor before I slumped upstairs, knocking on the bathroom door. "Hit the road, Stace," I heard him snap.

I opened up the door and steam pummeled my face. "Hey, angel," I called. "How was work?" I shut the door behind me and sat on the toilet as he poked his head from around the curtain, his fingers curling around the orange and blue checks, dampening them into something dark.

"It was just observation today, nothing challenging," he said, his mouth sinking. "But then, I got to make everyone miserable at our pick-up game against the football team, so that was fun."

"Oh, that's not good—now, they're gonna get back at you and trash the house even more," I groaned.

"We are locking the house, nobody is allowed inside," he declared, slicing his hand across his body. "I'm not kidding. Backyard or bust. My family is due at ten in the morning, and I already vacuumed and scrubbed the floors, so it has to stay perfect. I mean, I'm about to bust a whole load of shit on them, I don't need it to be with, like, puke crusted over on the couches and stuff."

"What if people need to use the bathroom?" I laughed.

"There is a perfectly good line of bushes against the garage," Logan snapped, yanking the curtain back in place. Then he tugged it back and gave me a slippery smile. "You need a shower?"

"No," I said, biting down on my grin, the wicked feel on my lips.

"You _want_ a shower?" he corrected, bending his finger as a lure.

Yes. "No," I replied with a sigh. "I better go find the girls, see what's up with them. Keep playing keep-away with the truth." I stood up and went over to kiss him; his hands darted out and grabbed me under my armpits, hauling me into the tub. I screamed at the water hit me, coursing through the fabric of my tank top, soaking my skirt. Balling my hands up into fists, I punched him in the hard plank of his stomach and then wrenched my shirt away.

"Cheater!" I squealed as he took off my skirt and underwear and tossed them over the curtain rod. "Cheater, cheater, pumpkin eater!"

"Wow, that was deep," he laughed, wrapping his arms around me. "I just missed you today. I mean—there was a woman? Who came with her daughters, and I just…"

"Twin daughters?" I asked, leaning my head against his chest. The water was striking his head and then running down the front of his body, waterfalling on my shoulders, my hair. It was hot, this water, but not a fierce thing. Not the heat of fire. It was almost uncomfortable, but I loved the scorching feel of it on my skin.

"I can't stop, like, looking at photos of my family, you know? Of my cousins. Sosie and Susana, over and over again. Sosie in her UK shirt, Susana in her U of L shirt. Sosie in her Army uniform, Susana in her Marine blues. Sosie the bridesmaid and Susie the bride. They aren't identical, but damn, do they look it. I mean, they are total Brunos, like Dad and Hunter, with the dark skin and the dark hair. They have the same smiles, the same way of standing, the same, like—they're _sosia_, _capisce_?"

"_Si_," I nodded, wiping a trail of water from my eyes. They were _sosia_, they were the same. Two girls growing into two women that were the same. I touched my stomach. "_Sono triste_."

"_Mi sono perso_," he admitted, slinking his head on my shoulder, and for a moment, all of the heaviness, the misery that he must was feeling crept into me, washing me like the water. I am sad. I am lost. _"Non importa—ti amo_, _tesorina_."

"I love you, too," I whispered.

He grabbed his shampoo and squirted a large amount into his hands. I exhaled a long, loop of breath as he worked his hands into my hair. "We have to decide."

"Can we just not talk about it, please?" I begged, reaching back and squeezing my fingers around the lines of his pelvic bones. "Please, I can't."

"Mary Anne, we can't keep putting this off," he replied.

"Just a little bit longer," I urged, and I relaxed as I heard the water bounce off of his nodding head. I cleared my throat. "So, what did you observe today? Tell me, love—cavities or fillings or what?"

I kept him talking through the shower, through the rustle of towels on our damp bodies, turning us from water things back into dry. He talked as he tugged on a pair of shorts and a shirt before disappearing into the study. And I was then left in silence, standing back in the foyer, dry and in new clothes, the sounds of my husband flipping through books replacing the beat of water. These were his sounds.

I wished that I could peel them open, the water on the tub floor, the hum of paging through books, the moans that I made from touching him, rip them right back and find an answer. Find a truth. Words weren't enough now, words couldn't dig into what was happening and giving us the right way. Words couldn't shine down on my stomach, on my lymph nodes broiling away with cancer—they couldn't spotlight and illuminate what was right.

It was me and him and too many other things.

Letting my hand drift over my belly, I sighed and bent down to grab the bags. When I entered the kitchen, I noticed Dawn and Stacey swinging in the hammock below the willow tree, passing the thin barrel of a joint between them. There were two large citronella candles burning on the end table next to them; I could almost smell the mean bite of the insect-repelling smoke, covering up the cloying cloud of pot, that green-fingered thing. Stacey leaned down to wrench a tennis ball from J.D.'s mouth and sent that ball flying back towards the house.

"Hey, May," she said as I walked through the sliding doors in the dining room out into the yard. "We're prepartying."

"People aren't due over here for another, like, four, five hours," I frowned.

Dawn took a large inhale, sending a lungful of smoke spiraling over the candles. It mixed with the black charge running up from the citronella, and they danced up into the sky before evaporating into a gray haze. She stubbed out the joint and shrugged. "Well, we need to decorate and shit. We needed a little charge. Stace'll do another one before the party since, no know, no drinky for the Stacey."

"You had wine at dinner, though," I pointed out.

"Yeah, but a glass or two of red wine on top of a carefully plotted meal reduces oxidating stress caused by increased glucose," Stacey said, tapping my head as I settled down on the grass at their feet. "My diabetes is my bitch, but it's still diabetes, May-o. I can't charge along with booze. And besides, Dr. Collins is coming over, I don't want to be trashed at all."

"Your _professor_?" I squeaked. "Why would he want to come!"

"Dude, he's coming, two of the fellowship lecturers, all of the other grad students are coming…in fact, there're all going to a wine tasting and dinner tonight which I can't go to," Stacey grumped, watching J.D. hustle around the Japanese maple, trying to scritch her ball out from under the flood light. "Stupid drinking age."

"But—why are they coming?" I pressed. "I doubt a kegger with the UNC basketball team is high up on the social calendar of a bunch of Duke economics grads and, uh, their _prof_."

Dawn grinned. "May, Hen—Dr. Collins is super-cool. We had lunch with him today—like, he didn't want Stacey to feel excluded from dinner, so we went to this little French café and had lunch and stuff. We talked about activism and stuff? He's a Republican, though," she grunted, poking Stacey.

"Yeah, well, I could barely get in a word in edgewise. That's why he has to come, so _I_ can talk to him. About important things, like spread-market opportunities in emerging economies," Stacey shot back.

J.D. came charging over, dropping the ball in my lap. I tossed the ball again, this time towards the lilac tree by the gate to the garage. "Well, I told Dr. Montalbano that he and the other researchers were welcome to stop by, and their reactions were, Hell to the no. I guess your people are cooler."

"That was never in doubt," Stacey sniffed. "We're a hip breed. One of the grad students is having a dinner tomorrow night, and the whole department is gonna be there. It's a great opportunity to network, all casual and stuff."

"Stace, it's a dinner, not a moment for career advancement," Dawn laughed. "Chill. Priorities."

Stacey looked over at Dawn, and their bodies shifted, morphing into twin hard lines. Their eyes cast down to me in that steel way that they shared, hard and strong and fearsome. I shrank back as Stacey said, "Mary Anne, speaking of priorities…Um, you might want to consider turning on a fan at night? When you're alone in your bedroom with your man? Because we can totally hear you two—"

_Having sex._ I winced, covering my face with my hands.

"—when you're crying," she finished, and my eyes popped open. I gaped at them, their calm, somber expressions. "You two have cried every night, and last night was the worst. We've been really good with backing off, but…not after that. It's hard enough to see you crying as though it was fucking middle school all over again, but him crying? It's freaking us out."

"That, and Mom called this afternoon," Dawn continued. She raised her eyebrows. "She asked me to keep an eye on you, closer than ever. Because—damn it, dude. Were you planning on telling us that you stopped your medication? Why, Mary Anne? God, that stuff is, like, your lifeboat."

"I had to stop them, because of—the pregnancy," I admitted, twisting my fingers in my lap. "They promote miscarriage."

"So, you're keeping it," Stacey pressed. "But, you'd have to wait five weeks before you could start chemo. May, that's not good, right?"

"Nobody knows," I said, so angry when tears began leaking out of my eyes. I struggled against it, trying to keep it down, but the words rushed out, rushing out like a crazed train over my tongue: "Dr. Wilks isn't sure so he's giving us until Monday. He said it's up to me and Logan, and Logan doesn't know because on one hand, he wants me to start treatment, like, yesterday, but on the other, a transplant could maybe cure me, and so…it's killing him because he's not sure what to do. And…I don't know. And it's not fair because there's no way that I can bring two babies to term, so either I hope that the odds work in my favor and I miscarry one of them? Or else I'd have to do a selective termination, and Christ, if I do that, why am I even bothering because then I've killed one of my babies, and how do I tell the other baby one day that I picked it over—"

Stacey's hand shot out and grabbed my shoulder. "What do you mean, _babies_."

"Mary Anne!" Dawn exploded. "Why didn't you tell us!"

"Because what good is that going to do, huh? I just want it all to go away, I don't know what to do—talking about it over and over again, it hurts so bad because I don't know what to do," I shouted, getting up to my feet. "There is no way for me to win here, is there. Is there! My body can't take two babies, there's no way that I can do this. I'm late enough in weeks to tempt me to continue with the pregnancy, but I'm still too early to be sure that I can do this and live. There is _no way_ that this comes out well. No way at all."

Dawn leapt off of the hammock, gathering me in her arms. "Mary Anne, come on. I know this, but you can't keep it all inside. You can't bunker down with Logan and hide from it."

"We're not hiding," I hissed, wrenching away from her. "It's just, what good is talking going to do, huh? You two don't need this, you don't. We've talked with the OB, with Dr. Wilks, I talked it over with Eddie and Dr. Paves and Sharon and with Sarah. Hell, I nearly talked about it with the bag boy at Kroger, okay? Talk, talk, talk, and nothing! What, do you two know what to do?" I whipped my finger between them.

"No," Stacey said, laying down that simple word. "But we can try to stop you from eating at yourself. Come on, May. You're going to drive yourself crazy."

I snorted. "Well, I'm off my meds. That may not be too hard of a thing to do." I chewed on my lip and looked at Dawn. "Sis…it's it horrible that I'm thinking that I want to end this," I said, touching my belly, "because I'm so scared of stopping my drugs?"

"It's not," she sighed, taking my hands. "But I think you're stronger than your pills. I do. I think that you need to remember how kick ass you can be. You and Logan need to make up your minds and stick to it. And that's that. No looking back."

"What would you do?" I begged. "Tell me."

Dawn looked over her shoulder at Stacey; Stacey sighed. "I don't know, May," Stacey told me. "I think…I'd think that I'd…keep going with the pregnancy. Get to the second trimester, start treatment, do the amnio. And then, if you haven't miscarried, I'd terminate one of the two. I bet one of them isn't healthy. Just thinking it over, running a probability theorem on it? I can almost guarantee, one of those babies isn't right," she said, not blinking at all. Not looking away.

"They say that, sometimes, with twins? One twin dominates, hogs all of the good things from the mother, forcing the other out," I mumbled, looking away from my sister. "It's…I don't want to think about that. That _that_ could be going on. They're only the size of, like, beans right now." I rolled my thumb up. "Just that big."

"Mary Anne," Dawn cooed, stroking my hair, still a bit damp from the shower. My feet grew heavy, and I slipped a bit, my eyes closing as I tumbled down into a slick darkness.

When I opened them, I was laying on the ground, Stacey fanning my face. "You fainted, are you okay?"

"Yeah," I mumbled, struggling back up, but she pressed me back down.

"Nice try," she said, shaking her head. "Dawn's getting you something to eat. You've been eating healthy, right?"

"Actually, yeah—I have a nutritionist that I see every few weeks. From the anorexia and stuff. I wanted my body to come back strong, not, like, padded with junk," I shrugged and then gave a bitter laugh. "So, yeah, that's one point for the babies. Their mommy's been eating right all along."

"No drinking, no smoking, no drugs, right?" Stacey prodded.

"Me?" I giggled. "Are you kidding? Erin and Jeremy say I'm more boring than blank paper. I'm _always_ the designated driver."

"You always have hated everything fun," Stacey lamented. "It makes me worry about you sometimes."

We smiled as I heard two voices come nearer, J.D. yipping in their wake. My dog crawled onto my chest and ladled my face with puppy kisses. I scratched her ears as Logan lifted my shoulders, snuggling my head into his lap.

"Fell down and went boom, huh?" he asked, reaching over to pat J.D.

Dawn punched his arm. "No, actually, I pulled my best Troy Glaus and caught her. You can totally worship me now."

"Oh, like I wasn't before," he smarmed, giving her an overly bright smile.

"Stop it, you're both pretty," Stacey snapped. She took the crackers from my sister and broke one in half. "Mary Anne? Should we get you to a doctor?"

"Dr. Chaplin said she'd get dizzy sometimes, that it was a sign that she needs to drink and eat and relax," Logan said, stroking my cheek.

I pointed at my face. "How do my pores look? She said I might break out 'cause my body has to adjust to the hormones and stuff."

Stacey peered at me. "You look fantastic—you're getting the glow, babe."

"Really?" I grinned, touching my other cheek. "I puked, though. Twice so far."

"Yeah, we heard—baaarf to the barf," Dawn laughed. A pained expression passed over her face. "May, dude, we'll cancel the party tonight. Maybe it's too much for you."

"That sounds fantastic," Logan announced. "No party, no trashing my place."

"Our place," I corrected, slapping his leg as I took a piece of cracker from Stacey. "Party on, ladies. If I have to go to bed at ten, that's no big. I'm certain you two will be responsible stewards of our place."

Bending his head over mine, Logan gave me a skeptical look. I swatted at him and sat back up, drinking from the cup of juice that Dawn handed me. "Oh, stop it. The girls won't let things get out of hand."

"Yeah, but their idea of 'not out of hand' is my idea of 'absolute mayhem,'" he retorted.

"I love me a little mayhem," Dawn cackled, clapping her hands. "Tonight will be excellent. I can feel it in my bones. We are all going to have a fabulous time or die trying."

She looked at me and winced. "Maybe that was a poor choice of words."

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There was screaming lilting all over the backyard. The bodies of dozens of people glowed in the twinkling bulbs that Stacey and Dawn had strung along the high line of the fence, making white skin look phosphorescent, black skin glisten with light. I shoved my way past a knot of girls from the women's basketball team to find the source of the shrieks.

It was Erin, slung like a sack over Keshawn's shoulder. "Put me down!" she yelled, swinging her fists against his back. "It's not my fault that you suck!"

"What now?" I cried, yanking on her hips, urging her back to the ground.

"Little Miss Science just schooled my ass," he glared. He swung his beer in her face, the foam charging over the lip of the cup. "I didn't know that I had fallen into the fucking S.A.T. here, you know?"

"I'm sorry that you just can't keep up," she sniffed. "I'll give you a cheat sheet of vocab for next time."

I grabbed her arm and pulled her back towards the table heavy with kegs and snacks. "Seriously, why don't you just admit that you have a crush on him, okay? This sixth grade pick-pick-pick is getting old, y'all."

Erin's face crimsoned. "Right, I liiike him. Because a big ass NBA-bound star would want Fat Kid here," she snorted, slapping her hips.

"Stop it!" I yelped, shoving her shoulder. "You are gorge, as Stace would say."

"Wrong. I'm freakin' smart. With guys like that, you gotta remind them that you're worthy of their time, and the only thing I got is my brain, baby," she sighed, adjusting her shirt so that her breasts bunched in the keyhole slit of her top. "And these. These are spectacular."

"Yes, they are," I said. I opened my lips to protest again, but she put her hand on my mouth.

"May, you're not going to win this one. Here, do a shot with me," She ordered, pulling out two plastic shot glasses. She poured some water into one and a heaping amount of vodka into hers. "Here's to our sexy brains, my girl."

"Here's to you," I giggled, tapping my glass against hers. We tipped the cups back into our mouths, and she squirmed at the impact of the alcohol in her belly. I kept laughing as I looked over the mass of people in my yard—most of Logan's team was here, knotted by the hammock discussing something boring and sports related. When I went over to them for no good reason other than to kiss my husband and whisper in his ear that I loved him, I was dulled by their conversation within thirty seconds.

I am not sure what a "platoon quarterback" is, and I'd like to keep it that way.

They'd occasionally peel away and stride to the beer or detour to the place where people had begun to dance, under the criss-cross of Christmas lights over by the garage. It was an odd convergence, some people swayed by the alcohol and dancing with a careless energy, others maneuvering their bodies as if hunting. As if they were targeting prey with their moving hips, their snaking arms. Stacey was careening between the two dancing styles, clutching a bottle of water while spiraling around, cajoling her body into a whirl as she sang with the music. And then a boy would sidle up to her, and everything would molasses in her limbs, humming in motion just for him.

She had gone through both of the starting forwards, a reserve guard, and two of the guys from the football team—no one had lasted longer than a song.

My sister, though, had been stalking the same guy all night, wrestling him into the dance floor over and over again. She was with him now, his huge body dwarfing even her. On his right arm, the tattoo of a dragon curled up and under his sleeve, its blues and greens a sick blast on his pale skin.

When the song switched over Dawn came barreling over to Erin and me. "Isn't he hot!" she yelled into my ear.

Erin bit her lip, and I sighed. "Dawn, have you tried to talk to him?"

"No, I'm letting my booty do the talking," she winked, pouring another beer.

After Erin nudged me, I said, "Sis? He doesn't really speak English that well. Veron's from Croatia."

"Excellent!" she crowed, slamming the air with her fist. "I'm five by five on sexy foreigners."

"Yeah, well, Dawn? One of the things he'll try to tell you in his broken English? Is that he's married. With a kid." I put my hand on her shoulder. "Sis, you've wasted two hours on a married guy."

Her mouth plummeted. "Married," she moaned. "God, it's like something's in the water here." Her eyes edged over my water suspiciously, and she tapped the cup. "I'm drinking Evian from here on out."

A large group of people pushed through the gate, and a young man with a wild cap of blonde curls spotted Dawn and waved. He pushed his way through the crowd and grinned as he approached us. "Hi, Democrat Dawn," he beamed.

"Hi, Henry," she said, her face as bright as her hair. She glanced over at the mound of people jumping in time with a Ludacris song. "Should I go get Stacey?"

I gaped at him. Dr. Henry Collins was a cutie. I had been expecting some old, gray-haired creature, musty with knowledge and arrogance. Not a Backstreet Boy. But he was young, cherubic with an overly freckled face, blotching over with the red of heat as he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his Oxford shirt.

"No, that's okay. This is not what I expected," he laughed. "You said a little get together with the Tar Heel basketball team. Not Beer Blast '09."

"So we misrepresented a tad," Dawn said, pinching her fingers together.

"I don't think I'll be staying, sorry. It's one thing to come over for _un petite soiree_ with my students. It's another if I witness keg stands. And trust me, after tonight's wine tasting? I'm pretty sure that Andy and Nan are keg stand folk," he winced. He looked at me and held out his hand. "Henry Collins. I teach econ at Duke."

"May Spier, I go to Duke," I beamed. "I'm right next door in the Psych building."

When he smiled, his mouth folded in his freckled skin, Rorshaching his cheeks and erupting a dimple in his chin. Oh, I would take econ from _this_. "I've heard wonderful things about you," he told me. "It's very nice to meet you."

"Same here," I smiled. "Are you sure you won't stay? I mean, I understand how this might be a little…weird."

Two of the grad students were behind us at the table, slamming back three shots in a row. "Just a tad," he nodded. "Besides, the Angels are on ESPN. I'm a huge fan," he confessed.

"No shit!" Dawn yelled. "My dad has season tickets, I became a fan in high school. Love me some LA A of A! Okay, so, whaddya think, can we beat the Dodgers?"

"Well, it depends on the pitching," he sighed, putting his hands on his hips. "See, I think we're pretty set in the batting with Vlad, Cabrerra, and A-Rod, but I just don't know how I feel about Thompson closing."

"You have to trust his arm, he has the stuff," Dawn protested, and I felt my brain fuzzing. _More_ sports? Are you kidding me? I looked at Erin and rolled my eyes, and she and I retreated into the house.

"They're everywhere," she whined, slumping into the kitchen. Before the door shut, a Nick Lachey song began charging out of the stereo. Barbara's favorite singer. She had worn a "Team Nick" shirt during poms practice for weeks during junior year. Team Nick and her Israel Birthright shirts. Babsie Babsie, I miss you. I love you.

Where are you? I need you.

The room swum with the scent of oranges—my mother, she was here, she was always here. She had been with me the moment the OB said it was twins, she had been there at Dr Wilks's office when he spread his empty hands and said, _Take a few more days_. She had been there last night, when Logan bent over and sobbed because he didn't know what to do. _I just want you to live, pretty girl, I just want you to live. But I don't know how to get that to happen_.

My mother. But not my Babsie. I need you, Barbara, I do, so desperately, my blood rocks with want.

I sighed, shutting the door the rest of the way. Jeremy looked up from the kitchen counter, his fingers messy with avocado. "Do we need more guac? I'm almost done."

"You don't have to do this," I scolded, scooting onto a stool on the other side of the counter. "Go on out there and have fun!"

He made a bitter noise with the air in his nose before taking a long drink of his beer. "Okay, first," he slurred, licking his finger. "The only people I know here are you two, your boy, and Dawn and Stacey. Second? Not to get all Pride Flag here, but I don't feel very comfortable around all of the jocks."

"Are you gonna hit on any of them?" I replied, tipping my head.

"No—they are not that cute, and I'm desperately in love with my Aaron," he sniffed, finishing off his beer and tossing the cup into the trash. It bounced off, sputtering beer onto the floor. Erin giggled, grabbing a paper towel and wiping off his mess.

She wadded up the towel and said, "There won't be a gay bashing, Jer, relax."

"My 'boy' wouldn't let that happen. You know Lo adores you," I promised. "Come on, Jerry, it's okay. Go on out there, and mix it up. You're already trashed! Aren't you two always saying that alcohol is liquid courage?"

"Nah," he slumped, grabbing a handful of peppers and tossing them into the food processor. "I don't wanna. Maybe if there were boys from the Duke swim team here," he mused, licking his lips.

"For real," Erin said, slapping the counter. "Bring me the hotties in Speedos, stat."

"You sound so much like my Randa," I laughed. "You two are gonna get along so well next month."

"Yeah, but Randa's a hottie, too," Erin grumped. "It's so not fair. Guys never, ever notice the chunky girl with the great personality. _Hairspray_ is a lie."

Jeremy shrugged. "Erry to my Jerry, babe, just a hint. Maybe if you weren't so damned insecure, maybe guys who aren't superficial would want to be with you. As long as you are, like, so caught up in how you look and show that you're miserable with it? You'll push the good guys away," he reasoned, hitting the puree button on the machine.

"Jesus, Mary, and Chris Rock, dude, who died and gave you your PhD in the past three days?" she shot at him, clutching her drink.

I gave him a light push on the shoulder. "You are gonna be such an awesome shrink."

"I know, right?" he preened, going over the fridge and grabbing a bottle of Dawn's Rolling Rock. I glanced out the window, looking for my sister, but she was gone. So was Dr. Collins—probably freaked out and ran for the hills. Through the crowd of people, I noticed Stacey, now dancing with Keshawn with a bored look in her eyes. What was she looking for? To the left of her, I noticed the two men sitting in the hammock. Tarik, an incoming freshman who would be here for one year and then off to the NBA, one of those people that you almost can't believe that you're meeting, they are so talented, so promising, even their smile says, _Watch this space_.

And next to him, my husband, J.D. perched in his lap, her stomach turned to the sky so he could rub her from chin to belly over and over again. Cradling her like a baby. He was laughing so hard at something Tarik was saying, the hammock was rumbling. Then his eyes moved over the party, those eyes so quick, faster than his feet, faster than his hands. This is what made him good: the fastness of him. The track star side, the rushing. His eyes moved in a blue blur—he was looking for me.

But I wasn't there, and they kept going, over and over. This is what made him great: his ability to pick things apart, to see under things and break them down, spreading out people and things into little pieces and knowing how they fit together, how they moved. And how he pushed, how he refused to stop pushing. Until he was right.

No wonder this week was killing him. No matter how hard he tried, there was no way to put things back together again just right. There was no way to be perfect. And there was no way to just let it go.

I pressed my hand against the window, willing him to find me, and he did, those eyes focusing in on my palm and the dark halo of my curls. Maybe the copper shine of my eyes grinning back at him. He touched his heart and then hitched J.D. in his lap before turning back to Tarik and doubling back into laughter as his friend continued to talk with a fierce gesture of his beer.

What would he do if I was gone, if he couldn't find me?

Babsie, Mommy, what do we do?

My phone started ringing from where I had left it on the counter. "It's the cops!" Erin cried, pretending to bite her nails. "They've come to arrest the Tar Heels."

"No, only we Dookies throw the wild, nasty parties," Jeremy laughed, dipping a chip into his guacamole and smacking his lips. I smiled, reaching over the counter to grab my phone.

"Hello?" I said.

"May," Emily breathed. "Guess what."

"You…have won the Pulitzer!" I crowed, walking to the living room. "They, like, totally think you're kicking ass at the _Times_ so they gave you the biggie, right?"

"Right," she snorted. "That's me, Intern Extraordinaire. No, May, my mom called me. Sabrina Bouvier died."

"No way," I breathed, sinking onto the couch. I could hear laugher from outside, under the British flag, a bright happy lift of laughter that seemed so wrong right now. Not that I liked Sabrina—she was a bit of a bitch. Still. If you had asked anyone at SHS, who was most likely to die from the Class of 2007, everyone would have said _Mary Anne Spier, totally_. Hadn't Price Irving tried to write that into the superlatives?

"Most Likely to Die," I heard Sheila McGregor cackle while at lunch, while I bent down next to the soda machine to pick up a stray quarter. "He put down May, it was like, could you be more of a dick?"

"But, it's kinda funny," Corinne King snickered.

"And kinda true," Kathleen Lopez added, and she and Margie and Andi laughed and laughed until my head spun. I ran to the costume room in the theatre and cried there until Barbara found me. And she texted my sister and my boyfriend, my then-only-a-boyfriend, and the three of them took me home.

I was supposed to be the one. Not Sabrina.

But if Sabrina died, maybe I would be saved? The way Sunny died when Logan lived? Maybe?

And I hated myself so deeply, my heart twisted, dirty and gray.

"How did she die?" I asked Emily, twisting my fingers in my hair. I reached under the afghan I had knitted and pulled out the Israeli flag that I had wrapped around me yesterday and put it over my shoulders again. It was slick on my skin, and I tucked a bit of it into the jean skirt I had borrowed from Stacey, cinched tight over my slowly-expanding belly with the belt that my best friends from high school and I shared.

"Meningitis, I guess. I mean, shit, that's harsh, to get sick in the last week of school, huh? I've been Googling it—wouldn't there be something? At least something from Central Connecticut saying, We had one case of meningitis, beware to the other students? Emily asked, and I could almost hear her hair swishing around the phone. What color was it now? Would she change it before I saw her next month?

"I don't know," I said. "I hope her family is okay. And her friends."

"Yeah," Emily sighed, and that word sounded like _Barbara_.

And it sounded like _Mary Anne_, too.

A thought bounced into my head, sparking against the sounds of laughter outside. "I wonder if Claudia Kishi knows. She was really close to Sabrina in high school."

"Whatever, Claudia blows. Cokie blows. You know, though? I wonder how many people lost touch with their old high school friends," Emily mused. "Maybe that would make an interesting feature story, like, interviewing people and seeing if they are BFFs like they promised."

"That's pretty excellent," I gushed. "Pulitzer City, here you come."

"For shit sure," Emily laughed. There was a scraping noise and then the muffled sound of talking behind the muting of her hand. And outside, there was the distinct soft break of lips that had been pressed together.

"Hey, May? I gotta go. My one roommate—Becky from Nevada? She's finally done for the night, so we're off to brave the wilds of the I-10 back to our little home crack den home," she sighed, and I could hear her gather up her stack of papers. "Wanna have a phone date with Randa tomorrow? Around lunchtime, Eastern Standard time?"

"I'm so there, my BFF," I giggled, touching the phone as if my fingers could sink through and touch Emily's face. "Love you, Ems."

"Love you, Maybelle. Give Lo a kiss for me, and hug the NoCal girls, too," Emily replied.

"Bye, Emmy," I called before snapping the phone shut. I heard my friends from Duke chattering in the kitchen, and then the front door opened, my sister stepping through with a dazed expression on her face.

"Dawn?" I gasped, and she jumped.

"Christ, May, what are you doing here?" she yelped, scooting into the room, pressing her fingers against her lips before letting them flutter down to her chest, resting between her perfect breasts. She looked sheepish and shy and spun—so unlike herself. She usually looked so little like me, but suddenly she did. This is how I look when my love kisses me, an unexpected press of his lips on mine.

That sound. "Dawn! Who is he!" I gasped, letting the flag fall off of my shoulders.

"You cannot tell Stacey," she rushed, taking the few steps over to me and dropping to her knees. "Promise me, promise."

"You mean…you and me? Keeping a secret from Stacey? _Your_ Stacey?" I whispered, grabbing her hands.

Dawn winced, but she nodded with a desperation that stung my heart. "Swear to me."

"I promise, sis," I told her, tracing a cross over my chest. As if we were just little girls confessing a sin that was no sin. Or maybe it was.

"It's Henry. Collins," she mumbled, ducking her head. "We were just talking about the Angels, and then LA—he grew up in Huntington Beach and went to UCLA for undergrad, so it was like, shit, here's someone who knows _home_, right? And then he kissed me," she whispered, ghosting over her lips with her fingers.

I whistled. "Dawnie, he's a professor!"

"He's not my professor," she bristled. "And he's only twenty-seven. He started college when he was fucking fifteen. I don't think many people treat him like a normal person, you know? Just like he's some economics genius—I mean, look at Stacey. She's basically bronzed his ass and put it on a pedestal shaped like the Trade Commission. But I was treating him just like a guy. And he must have found that hot." She blushed, overbiting her teeth onto the skin beneath her lips. "He asked me out for tomorrow night. You totally have to help me cover. Who is one of Lee's teammates that are gone for the summer?"

"Wait, wait—why not just tell Stacey?" I demanded. "She won't care, right?"

"Oh, come on," Dawn snorted. "Her freakin' hero? She'll have a shit fit. Me and Henry will have a summer fling, and then I'll go back to San Fran, and that'll be it. He totally agrees, don't tell Stace. We can do it, too. It was my idea to use one of Lo's teammates, okay, and he thinks that's right. Stacey worships him. I don't want to make things weird when I'm screwing her golden god."

I wound my fingers in my hair, the curls binding against my hand. "I hate secrets," I murmured.

"Yeah, well, you didn't have much trouble sharing the fact that you're all preggers with twins, huh? And the meds? You keep secrets with Logan all the time, don't you. We're sisters," she wheedled. "This is what sisters do, May. Please. I want my torrid romance. You know I think monogamy is for chumps. You know that this will end the second I get in the Beem to go back home. Please, pretty please, May? Be my sis."

Her head drooped on my lap, so close to the secret of these babies. Everyone outside, they knew that Logan and I were married. They knew that I was sick. But they didn't know that I was pregnant. Sometimes, you had to keep secrets, right? My sister was so warm here, the feel of fire in her heart, it raced into me. I put my fingers in her hair, stroking the shortness there. I curled those fingers tight into my thighs, right under the hem of the skirt.

"Duncan Morris," I sighed. "Duncan went home to do an internship with his dad's marketing firm back in Miami. He won't be back here until the start of school; I know this for a fact 'cause Logan chewed his ass out, said that Duncan should stay and benefit from all of the training and games they do over the summer. But Duncan's like Lo, you know? Won't play after college? So he really wanted to get a jumpstart on his career. He's your cover. Duncan's white, gonna be a senior, he's Logan's backup, he has brown hair that's kinda longish and big brown eyes. There you go," I stated, touching her hair again.

And I stared at that hair, my mouth stuttering out sound but not words.

"Thanks, May, I really—what?" she said, hearing me. She sat up, blinking at me, "What is it?"

All I could do was reach back to that hair, grabbing what I had touched. But she didn't need to see that spot where I had dirtied her hair. Because she saw it on her fingers. She gripped my wrist and pulled it down in front of her face.

My fingers, red with blood.


	6. Chapter 5

It's a ridiculous thing to drive yourself to the hospital with your drunk sister screaming in the passenger seat and declaring herself the voice of reason.

And it's even more ridiculous when the ER physician calls you _just another hysterical mother_ from the other side of the exam room curtain. Because that's what you are—just another pregnant woman who worries over every kick, every murmur, every mishap.

Though blood running between your legs? Isn't that something worth panicking over?

Apparently not: the doctor assured me that it was just spotting, that it was normal. "If it continues tomorrow, well then, come back," he directed, scribbling something into my file. "It's too hard to tell what it is. It might be the precursor to a miscarriage. Or it's just spotting."

"That's not spotting," Dawn yelled. "It's a fucking gusher!"

"No, it's not," he sighed, clicking his pen and putting it back in his coat. She hasn't bled in the hour that she's been here. It looked like an isolated thing, so it's not worth losing our heads, understand? Stress only makes it worse. You have to be calm, for Mary Anne's sake," his eyes darting down to the chart to check my name.

Don't bother—just call me by my label. The Mother. Maybe if it's said enough, it might feel like it fits.

On our ride home, we stopped at the shady gas station that never checked ID, Dawn pushing her breasts together as she purchased two twenty-four packs of beer. She sat there, the beer bottles clanking as I shifted Logan's Jeep from first to second gear. I grabbed her wrist and begged, "Don't tell him, please. His family is coming today, I don't want him to worry about this, too."

"Mary _Anne_," she hissed, pulling her arm away and rubbing it like it burned. "Those are his babies, too. You can't keep this from him."

"Oh, yeah? Maybe I should tell Stace that you were making out with her professor, huh?" I challenged, following the fork in the road onto Franklin Avenue.

Dawn fell silent, staring straight ahead. The trees that thicked by the side of the road shadowed the car in a dark and mean way, fingering the car in the secrets that hide in the dark night. "Fine," she sighed, slumping against the seat. She let out a bemused snicker. "We're really sisters now, huh. Totally sharing shit."

"Maybe we should take a blood oath," I offered with a lame shrug of my shoulders.

My phone erupted with noise. Dawn reached down and glanced at the view screen. "It says 'Angel.' Must be Mr. He Can't Know, huh?"

"Tell him that we were buying beer and got, like, distracted," I stated as the road narrowed its way into the campus area. I turned right onto our street as Dawn flipped the cell open.

"Hey, Lee," she slurred, slowing her words. "Sorry, we went on a booze run and got, like, totally sidetracked…Well, what, she has to check in with you all the time? Shit, man, give my girl some space!...Whatever, don't make me tell your teammates to call you _Lee_, then, huh? Relax, get your ass on the dance floor with one of those freakishly tall basketball girls, and close your eyes and pretend you're with May, huh?...No, she's driving, and besides, we're pulling into the driveway right this fucking moment," she recited, glancing at the garage, illuminated by the headlights. "Hold your horses, she'll be right there to tongue you, okay?"

Dawn snapped the phone shut and smirked at me. "How was that?"

"Terrific—except for the tonguing part," I said, curling my lips. "We're not the PDA couple."

"Whatevs. Logan says that Keshawn wants to do a toast for the two of you, so you have to hustle." Dawn grabbed the beer as she climbed out of the car. She took my arm as I opened up the gate. "We're in this together now, understand? Your secret, my secret—no spilling the beans."

"Promise," I nodded, following her into the throng of the party. It seemed noisier, rowdier than it had before, more people crowded with dance. Stacey was lounging on the hammock between Logan and Veron now, J.D. spread over her legs.

"Thank Jesus, Erin said you two left for beer ages ago," she snorted, nudging the dog to the ground. "Did you get lost?"

"No, I wanted snacks, but nothing looked good at Kroger, then Mary Anne and I got kinda wrapped up in talking about how much Richard sucks, and then, like, we got carded so we had to try a couple other places, and it was just a disaster. Still! I have beer!" Dawn crowed, holding up the two cases.

"Way to persevere, May's sister," Danny, a sophomore guard, smiled, ripping into one of the boxes and fishing out a Miller Lite. "Very cool."

Logan opened up his arms, and I settled there in his lap. The doctors had thrown away my bloodied underpants, and I hoped that none of the guys sitting on the ground saw up my skirt as I crossed my legs between his. "I had to hear from Jeremy that you left," he said with a small pout. "I thought you had ditched me with the carnage."

"Hey, I always come back," I grinned, kissing his cheek, and trying not to shame down in a shiver as he smiled at me from a deep place under his heart, murmuring his hands through my hair.

"Shawn wants to say that you're pregnant, but I told him no freakin' way," he mumbled into my ear. "He's the only one who knows—I figured we should keep it that way until we decide what to do."

Unless it's decided for us, I thought, rubbing my stomach. I pulled his hand there, too, and we sighed, trying to pull the other under skin, into bone and blood.

"Is it time for bed yet?" I whispered.

He grinned at me and poked Stacey. "I think you and Dawnie might become the Hostesses with the Mostesses in about ten minutes 'cause Mary Anne wants to turn in."

"And you want to shag her silly, whatever," Stacey muttered, staring up at the sky. "Why didn't Dr. Collins come?"

"He did," I blurted out. Dawn's eyes widened, and I tightened my lips at her. "He took one look at the kegs and skipped out."

"Fuck," Stacey sighed. "I really wanted to talk to him about today's discussion. I don't think I really nailed my position on Nicaragua's free market integration." She put her hands over her eyes and said something so soft, it came out in the sound of rain.

I put my hand on her arm. "Stace?"

"I wish…no, nevermind," she said, shaking her head. "I'm fine. I just need to keep dancing. Keep moving. Sitting here is making me maudlin."

I frowned as I watched her bounced up from her place and charge into the dance floor. "Davis," Logan mumbled into my ear, and I raised an eyebrow. Stacey's old boyfriend from high school? What did he have to do with anything?

An urge to whisper to Logan about Dawn and Dr. Collins biled up in my throat, and I forced it down. No. I promised my sister, and she promised me. I had to be true to her about that, I had to.

It's not what sister do—it's what friends do.

The music snapped off, and the herds of people groaned. A cup of beer went flying over the crowd and landed in a splatter at the foot of the stereo. "Who unplugged the tunes, bitch!" a deep voice bellowed, and people laughed and booed.

"I did, shut the hell up," Keshawn snapped, jumping up on a chair next to the door. I noticed Erin and Jeremy there, both of them sloppy in their stances. They'd be passing out on the pull-out couch, I could tell.

Clapping his hand together, Keshawn scanned the crowed until he found Logan and me. "First off, I'd like to say, Thank you all for christening Karl's old place. Karl kept bitching that we couldn't have any parties here because of the baby, but he's gone, and it's a new regime now. 208 is now Ground Zero for team parties!" he crowed to a loud roll of applause and cheers.

"It's the what now?" Logan snapped, squinting at his friend.

"Second off, I planned this two weeks ago, like, a little thing to kick off the summer but fucking good. But then _somebody_ had to go and get married. And yes," he said, waving his hands to quiet the rise of noise, the whistles and the taunts, "a lot of you got ditched on an invite. Not me. Because I kick ass. But some of you were not cool enough. Don't worry, Coach made that _somebody_ stuff recruiting envelopes for an hour in punishment. So, we cool now. Besides, we were promised a huge ass wedding really soon—and I'm assuming with an open bar."

"I was thinking more, like, after graduation," I frowned, shaking my head. "Since when did he become the Cruise Director of our life?"

"Since _somebody_ said that he could throw a party here," Logan needled, pressing his fingers into my ribs. "Nice job, there, genius."

Keshawn thrust his beer into the air. "See, we can't get too pissed at May and Bruno, though. Mary Anne's sick, right, and that means that things get a little weird, right, and you gotta do things that you gotta do. So," he sighed, picking at the label on the bottle, shifting from foot to foot. He rocked like a skyscraper in the wind as he turned his eyes to the sky. "So, yeah. I guess—if May's sick, then Logan's sick. And if Lo's sick, then all of us are sick, too. Does that make sense? What I mean is, all of us are in this together with you two. You hurt, we hurt. You celebrate, we celebrate. We're family, us twelve, and that extends to our women, so yeah. We're in this together. So, good luck as you two begin this life as husband and wife, and, um, I'd wish you good luck on everything else, but you don't need it. You don't," he insisted, staring over everything between us and right into my heart.

No: right into my belly, to what was swimming there, the two beans of beings.

He didn't tell, but he said it, just for us. I touched my lips and blew over my fingers at him; he blushed, and hollered out, "I am so the best man at the real wedding, too! Fuck that bastard from Milwaukee, I'm the best man!"

I glanced at Logan as everyone turned towards us. My ears blurred out all of their sound as I looked at him. "It's gonna be Hunter," I giggled.

"You bet your ass it's gonna be him. If I had to choose between Shawn and Dave, it would be, like, Battle Royale in the middle of the church," he laughed, pressing his forehead to mine. "Which might be cool to watch."

Dawn reached over and slapped my shoulder. "Dude! Everyone wants you two to kiss!" she scolded.

And so we did, a long, lush thing between mouths that said everything.

Or at least, they used to.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Okay—khakis send a very, like, responsible message, but I think, if you're gonna wear a button down, it may be too much," Stacey muttered, tossing a pair of pants on the bed.

"Too much what?" Logan frowned staring at the heaps of clothes scattered around the room. On the bed, on the dresser, on the television, on the armchair in the corner. She had turned all of his closet and his drawers inside out, and I was pretty sure she was no closer to a decision.

Oh, well. He asked her for help. I had learned years ago, getting fashion advice from Stacey wasn't a quick thing. It was a process.

I climbed back to the part of the bed that was still safe from the McGilling, up by the pillows. I rested my head in his lap, wiping my mouth again. Just to be sure. "You okay?" he asked, rubbing my stomach.

"Yeah. I guess this is morning sickness," I shrugged. "I'm thrilled. I'll puke for a month from this, and then I'll puke from the chemo. Me and the toilet are going to be best friends by the start of school."

Stacey blanched. "Hello? I'm right here?" she said, snapping her fingers. "Don't like barfing, thank you? Anyway, I think that you don't want to send the message that you're trying too hard to be, like, 'mature.' Understand? I think either we go with khakis and a more casual shirt combination or a button down with jeans. Yes," she muttered, turning around and staring at the collection of shirts spread out on the chair.

"_We_?" he mumbled, reaching over for his glasses. "You're plannin' on wearing my clothes with me?"

"It's the royal we," Stacey sniffed, touching a green shirt. "This thing is disgusting." She marched over to the window, lifted up the screen, and then tossed it outside. It hovered there in the breeze for a moment before plummeting out of sight.

"Stacey!" we yelled.

"That? Was a favor to you both. That shade of green is gross. Forest green is good on Christmas trees, not on people," she declared with a shudder. "Or only if you have, like, winter coloring. Which you do not. You're totally a summer shade. I told you this back in high school, weren't you listening?"

"No," he snorted, recoiling a bit. "I just sat there nodding and thinking about, like, Pittsburgh's chances against the Seahawks."

"You were not," she laughed, grabbing a long sleeved white t-shirt. "You were thinking about Mary Anne. You two were back together. And it was sooo fabulous," she sang, placing her hand over her heart. "Gross. Love is for chumps, kids."

"It is not," I protested, twisting my head to plant a kiss on my husband's bare stomach. He smelled like his shower, the stripping clean of the ginger wash, though his hands had that rubber cast on them. He had gone out for drills outside, I guessed, while I had been out with J.D. for a walk. I took J.D. out and watched Dawn drive away for a breakfast with Dr. Collins.

"I'm off to see _Duncan_," she had hissed as she walked to my car. "Right?"

"Right," I sighed back. And no one knew the truth. Not even Stacey, glaring at the clothes that she had picked.

"I need to take you _both_ to the mall," she stated. "May's gonna need clothes for that tummy of hers."

Was I?

"Are you?" Logan asked, touching my hip. "Have you decided?"

"I don't know yet, Stacey," I admitted. "I wanted to wait until after we talked to Logan's parents. See what they said."

Stacey paused, sliding her eyes over at us. "That's a great idea. Let's ask the Catholics who had their entire life ripped right open when Momma Bruno had an abortion. I'm sure they'll be a great help."

"Stacey," I warned, feeling Logan go to stone against me. "That's not funny."

"Sorry," she said, her face slumping. "I'm really sorry, honestly. But…it's true, right?"

"It's true, but don't ever be flippant like that again," he said, those words pressed too flat, coming out too cold. I snuck an arm around his waist and squeezed him to me.

Stacey ducked her head, sheepish, and reached to the bed. "Alright. These," she said, tossing him a pair of deep navy jeans. "So, okay. Shirt." She kept turning in a circle to look at her choices, winding herself like the hands of a clock.

"So, um, what's going on with you and Davis?" I asked, clearing my throat.

She raised an eyebrow at me. "Nothing, Mary Anne. Nothing is. He's off in Africa doing aid work with his church. I told him to go meet some hot Baptist do-gooder while he was there, you know, let go of me? And he finally said okay." Her fingers drifted over the buttons of a polo shirt the color of brushed gold, of the rings on my hand. "He's finally moving on."

"Are you okay with that?" I replied, sitting up so I could look at her square in the face.

Shrugging, she answered, "Well, sure. I told _him_, right? It was time. He's going to be a senior, he should start thinking about finding a girl, getting married, and stuff. That's not gonna happen with me, not for a long time. No offense," she said, linking her hands together in front of her chest, "but I'm not ready to get married, not at all. I'm still getting used to just being Stacey again. And I slip sometimes, still," she mumbled, her eyes flickering on Logan.

"Stace, you're doing great—really, I think you've really grown up. Don't beat yourself up, you know?" he said, mouth crooked in a small smile. "And don't think that he needs a wife or whatever. He'd take this as a trial, like the trials of Abraham or whatever. God is making him wait for his dream woman. And you know that guy loves a good Biblical allusion."

"Right," she rolled her eyes. "I'm his dream woman. I'm not Baptist, I'm not that religious, I'm white, and I'm more than a pinch superficial. We're a match made in heaven."

I shook my finger at her. "You're brilliant, you're loving, you're amazingly loyal, you're very strong and courageous, and you're a friggin' babe on top of it all. I dunno, Stace, that's pretty perfect if you ask me."

"Yeah, well, I didn't," she grinned. She picked up a lawn-shaded shirt and held it up in the air, narrowing her eyes between it and Logan. "Seriously, I just don't think it's fair for him to hang on for me when I'm not sure when or if I'll ever be ready. Besides, in a year, he'll be in grad school God knows where and then he'll graduate and _go_ God knows where. I mean, what a freak show—foreign affairs and Arabic? It's like he's majoring in I Have a Death Wish with a minor in Fuck Terrorism."

"It's actually a double major in I Have a Death Wish," Logan teased.

"I'd Love to Die in the Middle East major," Stacey laughed. She slapped her hands over her mouth and whirled her eyes at me in a panic. "Oh, my God, I did it again. Mary Anne, I wasn't thinking, I didn't even think about—"

"Why would you?" I murmured, giving her a fluttering smile before looking down at my hands. "Stace, don't sweat. Though," I added, "be sure to not do that in front of Randa. You know her."

"What, Queen of the Empty Threats?" Stacey snickered, but her eyes were still large, obsequious things. "May—"

I held up my hand. "It's okay. Really. I'm not lying."

Not about this.

Stacey handed Logan the green shirt as well as a white tee. "Layering," she said with a curt nod. "Don't tuck it in, unbutton to about here," she instructed, rubbing her sternum, "and for God's sake, don't wear your glasses. They age you by ten years. I want your parents to look at you and think, 'This is our little boy,' which will reduce the likelihood of, like, screaming and violence. Do you agree, Psych Girl?"

"I do concur, though Lyman and my dad could probably get a beer and discuss their irrational reactions to situations," I said with a soft snort. "Alrighty, Stace, find me something that doesn't scream out 'knocked up.'"

"Classy," Logan grumbled.

"Actually? That's what Sharon told me yesterday. 'Don't look knocked up,'" I laughed. I reached over and scratched J.D. on her hips. "Has Kerry softened the ground at all?"

"I don't know. Kerry's gonna have a shit fit when she realizes that babies equal premarital sex. I'm hoping she remembers that she's my ally, and that she can scream at me later," he sighed, seizing my hand in his. His hand was so cold, it pressed through my skin and send a glacier into my blood, a thing that iced me over in his fear. I wanted to take him under the blankets, put my body against his and force him to be warm, to be wanted and beloved and full.

But the sounds of Stacey flipping through my dresses sobered my hands, my mouth. I just sat against him, waiting until she left, hoping that he wouldn't be a frozen, terrified thing by then.

"Here, this dress is perfect," she gasped, holding out dress that Erin had found for me at a vintage store, a faded floral print of orange, blue, and green bubbled poppies. "It hits you in all the right places and unless they have x-ray vision, they won't see a damned thing. Which, honestly, I can't tell unless you're wearing your jeans because the waistband looks just a pinch too tight. But that's it, May, I swear. Besides. The dress shows off your legs—that's your best asset."

"Mary Anne does have great legs," he agreed, tracing the line of my left calf.

"So, that's what you are. A legs guy," Stacey laughed, grabbing an armful of shirts and walking them back the closet. "I always wondered."

"No," he protested. "I noticed her smile first, I notice her smile always."

She gave him an exasperated look. "Oh, sure."

"No, really," Logan insisted. "Ask her yourself."

I grinned. "It's true—though, I mean, that first time you saw me, you did notice that I was wearing knee socks. Even back then, you had a thing for legs," I laughed, twisting my knee over his thigh.

Stacey spun around from the closet and put her hands in her hips, jutting out her shoulders like a supermodel at the end of the runway. She preened her face into a beaming smile and asked, "What do you notice about me?"

"I don't know—it's like looking directly at the sun," Logan said, tilting his head at her. "It's too, like, overwhelming to take in at once. Like, the perfect hair and the perfect clothes and just everything? It's too intimidating. You're scary beautiful, Stace," he shrugged.

"Scary beautiful," Stacey mused, running her hands over her hair. "Is that good or bad?"

"Good," he stated. "But not exactly for me, you know? But, hello, it seems like half of the men on earth get totally turned on by you, so I don't think you have to worry at all."

"Oh, trust me, I don't," she declared, folding up a pair of jeans. "I just get flummoxed by the guys who turn me down. It's obviously not with me—it's with you. You're either damaged or gay."

"I'm not gay!" he shouted. He rubbed my belly. "Hi, have you met out dilemma? That comes from not being gay?"

"Could be a cover story—I mean, you read Jodi Picoult, and you have very nice fngernails. Gayer than the Castro District in Frisco, that's what that says," she sang, snapping the pants in the air. Her eyes lit up as she added, "And you love Mandy Moore a little too much. Maybe she's this generation's Barbara Streisand."

"Out! Get out of my room!" he bellowed, pointing at the door.

Stacey winked at me and scooted out, shutting the door behind her. I smothered my laugh as best as I could, but the way he looked at me, all wounded and bewildered, just ripped the top off of my tongue. He put his fingers in all of my ticklish spots, and I began to scream out, the ribbon of my laughter blooming big and wild. He put his mouth on the side of my neck, right where he could make me smile and giggle, and blew a current of air there, vibrating his lips and making my skin honk. I clawed at his shoulders, lost for the words to make him _stop_ but knowing that if I said it, he'd pull back. I'd rather be paralyzed by this, seizing up in the fury of my laughter, than have him slip away. I put my hands on his face and forced it to mine. If I kissed him, now that was better than words.

When his face left mine and slid down my body, I almost forgot. I almost did, and then I froze, digging my nails into his shoulder as he crossed the horizon of my hips. "Angel, no," I said. "We need to get ready for your folks, we don't have time."

He stretched his hands up my chest. "You really are going to make me stop?"

No. But I had a vision of blood, of werewolves, teeth slick with red, and I shuddered. "Come on, husband, we've got so much to do. And they'll be here in less than an hour. And you know how this goes—you do that for however long it takes, then I'll want to be good to you, and then it'll be ten, and Hunter and Kerry will walk right in on us." I forced my voice into something light and fun and said, "Who wants to scar them for life with the sight of their naked brother and their new sister?"

"Good call," he winced, pressing his lips against the top of the hard cup of my pelvis. "Hey," he beamed. "You're their sister now."

"I am," I said, and this time, I didn't have to pretend when I smiled. "I'm really a member of your family."

When he crawled back up to me, he took my face in his hands. "My mom won't be so dumb to say it, but my dad or one of the birds might. That you should call Dad 'Dad' and…call Mom 'Mom.' Let me say that I'm sorry in advance, and I hope it doesn't hurt you," he sighed.

"It won't—it'll sting a bit, I bet, but it won't hurt. Cripes, wow, I have a new mother. I'm her daughter," I blinked, touching my heart. I waited for a sign from my mother mother, something that would stir in the air, but everything was still. Had I hurt her? Did she feel like I was letting her go?

Never, Mom, never. I'm just moving forward. There's a difference.

Logan climbed out of bed and slid off his shorts, rooting around in the dresser for a pair of boxers. "Put the movie back on—Mandy Moore is about to say the best freaking line in the movie."

"What, 'You're not born a gay, you're born _again_?'" I teased, reaching for the remote and hitting play.

"Funny, Stacey, very funny," he glared. "No." And we watched her character hurl a Bible at another girl and shriek, "'I am _filled_ with Christ's love!'"

"Oh, I'm good now," he sighed, grabbing the clothes that Stacey picked. He scratched the top of his head, and I stared at him.

"You can grow out your hair, you know. Personally, I love you with this buzz cut deal, I think it makes your face look really strong and all, but just so that you know, you can grow it out. It's okay," I told him, resting my chin on my knee.

He looked at me as he hopped while pulling up his jeans. "I like my hair like this, pretty girl. It's low maintenance, nobody can 'accidentally' pull it during a game, and I agree. I think it suits me better," he shrugged.

"It brings out your cheekbones," I said in my most Stacey voice.

"Oh, thank God, that's what I was aiming for," he said, flinging his hand over his heart. "So where did Dawn go?"

"Breakfast," I shrugged. "I'm not my sister's keeper." I'm her secret keeper. I crossed my fingers and hoped that Dawn was right, that Stacey would buy the lie that Logan would freak over her hooking up with "Duncan" and keep it quiet, too. We just had to get through ten weeks. We could do that, right?

Maybe we could arrange a vacation, buy us a week or two…

We cleaned our room, we cleaned the bathroom, I harped on Stacey to control the hurricane that had become her bedroom with Dawn, the king-sized bed that they shared a disaster of sheets and clothing. "Hey, our room, our sanctuary. Keep it Bruno free," she retorted, slamming the door shut behind her.

She left for the library, Dawn didn't come home.

Logan and I went through with dusters and nervous eyes, and Dawn didn't come home. How long would she be with Dr. Collins? How long could this last? She said she would be here, where was she?

A car pulled into the driveway, and I raced to the windows, the heat of my husband swooshing in behind me. Dawn?

"It's them," he breathed. He ran his hands over his shirt and whipped off his glasses, setting them on the end table. "Do I look okay?"

"You look sexy as hell," I grinned. "And very nice. Don't be scared, okay? Let's not underestimate your family." I took his hands and kissed each knuckle, the figures of his brother and his sister passing by the corner of my eye as they raced to the front door. "I love you, angel, and I'm right here, just like you were with me and Dad."

"I shoudda punched him," Logan muttered, kissing the top of my head. "I can't believe I let him touch you like that."

"It's okay," I shrugged as the doorbell chimed, booming in the stairway and then echoing into all of the rooms. "They're hee-eere."

"Oh, Christ," he muttered, and I could feel the swing of his hands over his forehead and his chest, touching four times. "I love you, _tesorina_, and just again—I'm sorry in advance."

I laughed as I skipped on over the door. Kerry flew at me, her arms tight around my shoulders. "I didn't tell anyone!" she whispered into my ear. "But Mary Anne, I am so happy—we're sisters now!"

"I know!" I giggled, kissing her cheek. "It's way cool. I love sisters."

Logan was swinging Hunter like a pendulum, ticking his body back and forth in the living room. "Huh? You think you can get bigger on me without telling me?" Logan shouted, twisting his brother upside down and shaking him. "That's unacceptable!"

"Stop it, he'll totally puke," Kerry snapped, unwrapping herself from me. "Stop it!"

"Relax, _Alladola_," he grinned, flipping Hunter back to his feet. "I can make you puke, though." He grabbed her and flopped her body into his arms, the way that he carries me all the time, and then he dropped his arms from under her shoulders, her knees clutching hard to the trunk of his arm.

Kerry put her hands on the ground and kicked her legs up, holding a tree of a handstand for almost a minute before settling herself back down on the ground. "So there," she smarmed, sticking out her tongue. She tossed her arms around her brother's neck and held him, the two of them murmuring into each other's ears and smiling. She was three inches taller than me, that height changing the places where he could hold a girl. We looked so odd together, short me and tall him. Her height matched better.

Maybe, if I died, he should—_No. _Stop. Maybe he was a legs guy and a short guy. That made my face flash over in a smile. I hit all of his _things_, maybe. I was a perfect storm of his needs.

Hunter was taller than me, too, but only by an inch. I hadn't known Logan at twelve, but I knew him at thirteen, and his brother was almost as tall as he had been back then. Tall and dark where Logan was tall and light. I ruffled the wavy mass of his sandy hair and gave him a kiss on the cheek. He didn't pull back—I wondered if he had a girlfriend, I wondered if he was still too young for those kinds of things.

"Hi, Barry Add," he sneezed. "Oh, I'b sorry."

"Oh, Hunt, we have a dog," I moaned. "She's locked upstairs, though, but tell me if it's totally making you miserable."

He shrugged. "I'll go take by bedicine. Bob said dere was a dog. I wish I could play wid her." Poor Hunter, I thought, hugging him again. "I'd so eccided to be here, dough!"

"I'm excited to have you here," I grinned. "Come on, let's go into the kitchen. We cleaned that extra hard, it should be better for your allergies."

I led Hunter into the other room, and he pulled out a small plastic case from his pocket. When he opened it, I saw that it was full of pills with a space for an inhalator on one side. He took a deep breath from that, and then he popped a few pills into his mouth and swallowed them dry. "Better," he said, giving me a thumbs up.

I heard the roll of his parents' voices in the living room, but I stayed with Hunter, chatting with him about his lacrosse team, how he enjoyed his first year at SMS. The other voices moved throughout the house, going into the study, up the stairs, back down and here into the kitchen with us.

"The house is so cute!" his mother gushed, as the four of them walked through he dining room to join us. When Rose saw me, she tossed down her large shoulder bag and rushed over to me. "It's so cute, Mary Anne, it's perfect. It's so nice to see you!"

"I know! I mean, to see you!" I giggled, resting my forehead against her shoulder and feeling so much like a child as her hand stroked down my back. Like I was her child. She seemed stronger, fleshed out over the frailness of her bones. Or maybe they were frail because there was nothing to protect them. Still, she seemed well again, almost the lanky, solid woman that I remembered from middle school, not the shelled out woman, dead inside from lost babies.

My stomach knocked against her hip, and I felt the need to be sick again.

Logan's dad reached over. "Come on, don't hog Mary Anne," he laughed, "How are you, sweetheart?" Lyman kissed my cheek and gave me a hug, bearing me in his large arms.

"I'm fine, how was your trip?" I asked, my voice lost in his chest.

"Oh, fine. The Stamford airport is always an adventure in mediocrity," he smiled. "But we got here, we got the car just fine, so that's all that matters."

"Indeed," Rose nodded. "We're starved, though—I was hoping for something in the breakfast snack variety on the plane, but no. Do you need me to go to the store?"

I was about to say no, but Lyman looked outside with a horrified look on his face. What? Did we miss something in the clean up? "Where is your grill?" he yelped.

"We couldn't afford one," Logan shrugged, his arm around his sister's shoulders.

"Oh, that's unacceptable," Lyman announced. "Your mother and I were planning on making a famous Bruno barbeque, and what are we going to use, a George Foreman? Come on, right now, we're going to Lowe's. Let's go."

"And we can stop at the store," Rose added, staring at the fridge. "We need so many things, it's incomprehensible."

"Let's go," Lyman declared. "Mary Anne?"

I waved my hands. "Why don't all y'all go, and I'll stay here with poor J.D. She's gotta be so bummed to be up there alone, not with all of the fun."

They were gone for a long time; I curled around my dog on the soft fleece blanket that Logan had spread over our bed. My dog huddled against my slowly billowing stomach, a book perched in my hands—an old Megan Rinehart book that had been made into a Cam Geary movie years ago. I had grown out of that actor back in my freshman year—maybe it was his bust for heroin possession, or maybe I just got older, changed, viewed things through different eyes.

Once I thought my still-boyfriend-then-not-boyfriend looked just like Cam Geary. Then he changed shape, and I lost that idea. Lost it, got something new. I got him again.

I listened to the quiet of the house. Stacey said she would come home to change for her dinner; she promised that she would be here. But Dawn—where was Dawn? I forced myself to erase my head of all of those thoughts, of what she could be doing. Because kissing Dr. Collins, sleeping with Dr. Collins—all of it evaporated and left one thing in my mind: Stacey, hurt. Stacey, furious.

But maybe we were underestimating Stacey, just like Logan and I might be underestimating his parents. The truth, it set us free, right?

I let my hand drift down to the place where I had bled. But it could also make us hurt. I couldn't do that to Logan, not now. Not yet.

We could wait, right?

The house exploded with sound, all five of the Brunos storming in through the back sliding door. "Mary Anne!" so many voices yelled. I kissed J.D. on her nose and quickly made my way downstairs, to the living room where they were all waiting for me.

Hunter crashed into my body. "You're by sisder!" he yelled,

"I am," I laughed. "He told you?"

"Kind of, they noticed the ring. I was banking on them being a little less observant," Logan smiled, his mother's arms around his neck.

"What do we need to do, with the cancer?" she asked, stepping forward to kiss me, a soft impact on the side of my mouth. "Do you need us to call anyone? Second opinions? Are you okay with money?"

I bit my lip. I actually didn't know how much money the Brunos had; I didn't want to impose on them. My brand new family—how generous would they be after we told them about the babies? "No, I have really good insurance through the school, and I have, um," I lowered my voice, the way that money shames us into quiet tones, "have a trust fund from my grandparents' death and the sale of their farm. It's more than enough to pay for school and stuff. And if my folks ever stopped taking care my co-pays, I can cover it. I'll take out a FAFSA and use my trust for my medical care."

"Well, we're happy to help," Lyman said, nodding. "Really. These two are going to college scott free," he said, pointing at Logan and Kerry, "so it's okay. Don't think that you're taking advantage to ask. Didn't buy a grill." He let out a disgusted snort.

"This is so exciting," Kerry beamed, though her smile faded away. "I mean, not you being sick again. But you'll get better right?"

"That's the hope," I shrugged. I tried to smile, too, but it wouldn't start. Instead, I held out my left hand, and the family huddled around the rings.

"It looks wonderful on you," Rose smiled. "He showed us, gosh, a year ago, was it? Lovely."

"The wedding bands are ugly," Kerry announced. "What, did you get them at Wal-Mart?"

"No, Target," I laughed. "They were cheap. We didn't much care."

Lyman reached out and pulled a lock of his wife's hair around his finger, ringing it there. "For your formal wedding? We'll give you our rings."

"What?" I breathed, staring at their own hands.

"It's a tradition—to the first child married in the family, the parents pass on their wedding bands. And then we buy ourselves new rings. You get married to have children, this is a way to show that," Lyman smiled, putting an arm around Hunter. "I figured that Kerry would be first, though."

"No way, boys are obnoxious, self-centered cretins," Kerry spat. "I haven't found a single worthy one. Maybe I should be a nun."

"I bet you'd be the first fighter pilot nun, then," I nodded. "A real trailblazer." Kerry tapped her nose, as if we were playing charades, and giggled.

Raising up to put one hand on one son's shoulder and drooping one hand down for the other son, Lyman said, "So. We're going to go get this grill in order."

"We'll make some lunch and start the sauce—it'll have to cook for a few hours," Rose replied, glancing at her watch. "I'd love a tour of the campus this afternoon."

"We could go see Duke, too," I offered, and five horrified faces met me.

"March 28, 1992," Hunter said, shaking his head. "Doe, Barry Add. Never."

I led Kerry and her mother into the kitchen as the guys headed outside to stare at a large cardboard box. "Who wants to take a bet on who singes their eyebrows right off?" Kerry giggled.

"I'm saying Hunter," Rose answered, glancing out the window. "The kid has a real thing for setting the gas jets too high."

I grinned as Rose grabbed a bag from the specialty foods store in Durham. "We went there for some really good, fresh stuff for the sauce—it's Ly's family's secret recipe," Rose said. But her face snarled as she continued, "Are people always that mean to my son?"

"What happened?" I asked, my eyes stealing into the yard where that son was helping his father lift a large metal hood out of the box.

"This man called him a—" She slapped her hands over Kerry's ears and whispered, "F-U-C-K-E-R."

"Mom, I was there," Kerry rolled her eyes.

"Not all the time. He's used to it," I shrugged. "He rarely goes into Durham. You should feel really special that he took you."

Kerry sighed, grabbing a grocery bag. "Momma, it's like if…if a guy from the U of Louisville team went strolling around Lexington. The UK kids would have him strung up at Rupp Arena and using his torso as a piñata. And, and, I bet you and Daddy would totally approve of that."

Rose frowned. "Well, that's different. It's Kentucky."

"I guess I never really got how much basketball meant to people from there," I commented, unpacking the groceries from Kroger.

Fishing out a pot from the lower cabinets, Kerry looked at me. "Listen, Mary Anne. In Kentucky, there are three seasons. Basketball season, horse racing season, and then basketball preseason. I swear, the only people who don't get this are, like, Yankee women. It's, like, if you're from Kentucky, your blood pulses like a basketball. It's how it is. People who don't even go to U of L and UK pick a team and root for them like their lives depend on it."

"Why didn't Logan play basketball then?" I asked.

The two of them exchanged a look. "Lewis," Rose sighed. "The two of them were so hypercompetitive, and their dads were absolutely using their sons to work out their childhood rivalry. He played up until middle school, you know. Because Logan's legs were so long, the coaches stuck him in as a forward, waiting for the growth spurt that never came. And he's no forward—kid has no inside game. Still doesn't," she clucked. "But Lewis? Lewis was a terrific forward—he's stocky and was tall at an early age. Because Logan was, well—he wasn't bad, but he wasn't like Lewis, Ly pulled him out and stuck him in baseball and football. He did better there."

"That's…" Stupid. Men. I touched my belly and promised, _I will never do that to either of you. _Whichever of you makes it through.

A jar of pesto dropped from my hand and rolled onto the counter, banging hard against the splashguard of tile on the wall. I was acting like I was going to keep the babies, wasn't I. Like I had made up my mind. As if I wasn't going to have to pick one of them to live. Someone lives, someone dies. Who?

Me?

Tell me, tell me: who is the strong one inside? Who is worth saving?

Kerry brought the pot to a boil, setting two boxes of premade tortellini by the stove. She tossed in a handful of salt and turned to her mother, poking in the grocery bags from Fowler's. Rose pulled out jars of honey and molasses, bubbled-glass bottles with cloth wedged between the lid and the seal. She looked over each vial of vinegar, frowning at them as though she was suspicious of them somehow.

Kerry spread out peppers over the counter, small green curls and large red streaks of hotness, tomatoes so ripe, they were crimson around the crown of leaves. Onions and garlic and a sunshine bright lemon, a paper sack of brown sugar.

"Everything, I think," Rose murmured, twisting her mouth up.

"Did we have anything here?" I lamented.

"Oh, sure," Rose laughed, patting my hand. "You had salt."

Kerry winced. "Well, no. We had to get kosher salt. Sorry, Mary Anne, but table salt isn't for cooking."

"It's not?" I blinked, and Kerry and her mother exchanged a long, horrified look before averting their eyes down at the food.

"We should buy them a cookbook," Rose said in a stage whisper.

"I think they're beyond help," Kerry muttered back. She looked up and smiled at me. "Did Lo tell you? I'm down to six schools now."

"U of Lou, Kentucky, Auburn, Georgia, right? And Air Force, of course," I smiled, handing her package of precooked chicken.

"And York in Toronto—Canada has the best divers in the English-speaking world, some really great coaches who defected from China? So, I'm thinking about going there to train with Xie Wu. I don't know. There's a lot to think about." She and her mother snuck smiles at each other.

"Do you like St. Mark's?" I asked, handing her a spatula.

She shrugged. "It's a high school. Though, it's sad how many Stoneybrook athletes go there. It's, like, if you have any talent, you avoid SHS and go to St. Mark's. They spend so much on us, it's ridiculous. You should see their field house," she whistled. "Like, dude, no wonder RJ Blaser and Wayne and stuff thought Logan was so queer for going back to SHS. They won the state title in hoops _again_ last year."

"Yeah, that kinda stung senior year, getting whupped by them," I winced. "But, you know, the guys who stay at Stoneybrook High finally get to, like, flourish. Look at Rick Chow. He never would have gotten to play quarterback if Irv Hirsch hadn't transferred to St. Mark's."

Kerry started shredding basil leaves. "I think Mercer's a totally cuter town, too. Mom says it reminds her of home—you know, the town square, all of the red brick? I've been pushing for us to move to Mercer for three fricking years."

I smiled, my head jerking up and looking out the window as Hunter ran away from a bee that was swirling around his head. He reminded me of J.D. the way he was yipping away, whirling in wild circles as his brother and father laughed.

This was my family, too.

My dress swung with the breeze of this new mother woman and this new sister girl moving around me, their giggling filling up the room like heat.

This was my family, too: four more people to hurt. Four more people to disappoint, to take their hearts and break them like bottles, like glass-hollowed things that shatter hard when struck. Struck like a hand on the side of a face.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Can't talk, changing," Dawn called, storming up the stairs.

I pressed my lips into a firm line as I heaved my body away from Logan's and off of the couch. I followed Dawn up the steps and marched into her room.

"Where have you been all day!" I hissed as she tore into a heap of clothes on the floor.

She pulled out her robe and began undressing. "Well, we had breakfast at this place down in Raleigh? It was so much fun, we were discussing, like, everything from the Angels and the Niners to NAFTA and illegal immigration and how America just won't banish Paris Hilton from our collective consciousness and whether or not tie-dye is quirky or ugly or both, and it was just fun!" she crowed, clapping her hands over her bare chest. I couldn't help staring—did she know how lucky she was to have those? To have anything there? I crossed my arms and looked away.

"Then, we went to a Durham Bulls game, and God, do they suck. And Henry and I were still talking about everything and nothing, and it was great. And then, we went for ice cream, and then I came home," she finished, shrugging. "I gotta hop in the shower. Stacey called, said she'd be home any minute. We gotta hustle if we're gonna make it to the dinner."

"Dawn!" I yelped. "You were supposed to stay here tonight!"

"Oh, you'll be fine," she blustered. "Besides, Logan is five times bigger than his dad. What's the worst Mr. Bruno could do?"

"You hate econ," I pointed out, edging in front of her path to the door.

"I do, but it means a lot to Stacey," Dawn whined. "If I'm gonna keep this secret from her, I totally need to, like, make it up to her and go tonight. Go tonight and spend a lot of time with her tomorrow, too. We were thinking about going shopping after all of the Brunos leave to see that cousin. What do you think?"

"Whatever," I said, shaking my head. This was moving too fast—how she moved conversations like they were carpets, tugging them from under my feet. I eyed her with dark eyes. "You're not going because Dr. Collins will be there, right?"

"Oh, hell no," Dawn snickered. "What do you take me for, some girl with a schoolyard crush? Come on. I don't need him to yank my pigtails. I'm going for Stace. She's been really insecure lately except with econ. I think it'll be really good for her to show her stuff off, and for me to say, Stacey, you rawk." She held up her pinkie and index fingers, banging that hand in the air.

"What's going on with her?" I asked, trailing her into the bathroom.

Dawn turned on the shower. "She hasn't had sex since coming to college, how's that for a start."

"No!" I gasped. "Stacey?"

"Yup," Dawn said. "The last guy was, well, Davis, when he came to visit over Christmas senior year. She won't talk about it—I mean, she acts like she's getting busy all over Stanford, right? But she's all, I'm not ready."

I leaned against the doorjamb. "Well, maybe Stacey wants to make sure that she owns herself before being with a guy. I mean, unpacking the rape was a hard, horrible thing to do. And she had so many issues and stuff, maybe this is normal. I'll read up on it," I promised.

"Thanks, I'd appreciate that," Dawn said with a smile. "I worry about her. Like, she's so much better, right? But, Stacey's so weird about guys now. All talk, no action."

"She used sex as a weapon for years," I shrugged. "I don't think it's abnormal that she'd recoil from it."

Dawn let out a deep breath. "Good work, Psych Girl. Just let me know what you find out. Now, I love you, and I let you see me naked, but you ain't showering with me. We aren't those kinds of sisters, no matter how many people from Kentucky you bring into this house," she stated, wagging her finger at me.

I laughed, walking out of the room and shutting the door. I heard the front door open as I was mid-way down the steps. Stacey said hello to the Brunos and made her way upstairs. "Hey, May," she grinned.

"How was the library?" I said, my voice two octaves too high. Smooth, Mary Anne.

"Oh, great," she nodded. "I am so Nicaragua's daddy. My position paper is gonna be tight." She snapped her fingers and beamed at me. "Tomorrow, we're going shopping. Sound good?"

"Excellent!" I chirped. I had to work on my casual nonchalance. Starting with the fact that I sounded like Alvin and/or the Chipmunks. "You guys sure you don't want to stay?"

"Are you kidding?" Stacey said, pulling her chin back in a wince. "I just watched the male members of the family march on out to the yard to begin grilling like they were entering the trenches in the Ardennes. I want my meat dead, not grilled into submission, you know?"

"It's some kind of masculine battle ground, the ability to work fire to their will and produce food things," I said with a somber nod.

"May your first child be a girl child," Stacey sighed, patting my shoulder. She kept her hand there. "How have the Brunos been?"

"Great, but we haven't dropped the baby bomb yet," I sighed. "If you guys get a text message that says '911' come home immediately."

She saluted at me and then winked, charging up the rest of the stairs. I went back to the living room where the Lakers game we were watching ticked down to its final moments. Kerry gave me a dreamy grin.

"Logan said to give you this," she said, kissing my cheek as I sat down next to her on the couch. "I bet he would have given you a real kiss, but that's a bit much, even for Kentucky."

"We were just ripping on _y'all_ upstairs," I laughed.

"Save your best stuff for Mississippi—my people are some odd, twisted folk," Rose mumbled, swinging a strand of yarn over her finger as she worked on a blanket. No, a sweater; I could tell by the angling out of the accumulated string, pyramiding from the small collar.

I pointed at it. "Who's that for?"

"Lewis," she smiled. "He says that his dorm at West Point is drafty, so I thought I'd knit him a sweater before term starts again."

"I like crochet better," Kerry confessed, leaning her head against my own.

"My best friend Barbara loved crocheting," I murmured, glancing over at her photo, a photo of her and Miranda and me from our trip to Italy three years ago. The day we stuck our hands in the Mouth of Truth, squealing as our fingers crept into the yawn of that opening.

_I will not die from cancer_, I had thought, and I waited for something to snap down and break my fingers off in a bloody, crushing way.

They didn't, emerging whole. Like me?

Kerry ran her fingers over her mother's arms. "Mom, should we start the rest of dinner?"

"That sounds like a good idea," Rose nodded. "Mary Anne, you want to take care of the salad?"

"I can do that," I smiled. I walked into the kitchen and grabbed the lettuce and vegetables, settling on the far counter by the sink. The sound of my stereo drifted from outside, purring out a song that made my hips sway. They missed the feel of hands on them, syncing in with my skin. I wanted those hands to wipe all of this away.

I glanced over my shoulder at Logan's mother. I didn't want her to hate me, to look at me with shaded eyes. I wanted it to stay like this, with me this wonderful addition to their family, a family that was working so well today. Not me, this ruiner.

Not me, this thing that makes people cry. The people I love most, I hurt the hardest.

When we sat down to dinner, the table groaning under the red-sweetened chicken and ribs, garlic buttered ears of corn, cornbread, beans, salad and a bowl of strawberries, the five of them tipped their heads against their chest. They crossed their chests, lowing themselves into prayer. It snaked from Latin, the recitation of the cross to a blessing in Italian that I barely understood, and back to that cross again. Cross my heart and hope to live. I mimicked that, I did.

"Are you going to convert?" Hunter blurted out, sniffing hard through his cleared sinuses.

"No, she is not," Logan said, narrowing his eyes at him. "And don't even start on sinning, she's just fine."

Kerry frowned across the table from me, glancing next to her at her father. Her father, sitting where my father did. I was in the same place as I was then. I wanted to be close to my dad when I told him my secrets; Logan wanted to be far away from his. "Well, will you raise your kids Catholic?"

"They have a long time before they have to think about that," Rose laughed, snatching a piece of chicken with the tongs. "I'm more concerned with whether you will get married in any sort of church."

"We will," I promised, spooning a large heap of salad onto my plate. "I'd like to have it in Stoneybrook, but we haven't really discussed it."

"There's always the cathedral in Louisville. All of the kids were baptized there," Lyman suggested. "All of our family is from there. And there are a lot more of us than there are of your clan."

"Dad!" Logan yelled. "That's not cool."

"It's true," Lyman shrugged. "I'm sorry, but except for us and some of your cousins? Everyone is within two hours of the Lou. Evansville to Cincinnati, Elizabethtown to Indianapolis. Besides," he added, "that's where we'll be."

The table grew quiet before Kerry's face pinked over, and she shouted, "We're moving back, Lo! We're moving back! Daddy took a new job, back with Louisville Slugger—no more stupid Connecticut, no more him going over to frickin' Iraq." She wrapped her hands around her father's arm. "Mom and Dad said that they'd look at places in Jefferson County, but I want to go to back to Belknap."

"But—how? I thought—how?" he spluttered, glancing between his parents.

Rose glowed, winking at her husband. "I'm finally ready to go back to work again, so your dad can leave that awful job with the defense contractor. And when he contacted people at Lou Slugger, they offered him a position back in Louisville."

"And not even a manager again," Hunter added, his mouth sloppy with barbeque sauce. "Dad's gonna be in product development—that means lots of time in batting cages, right? That's what you said."

"I did," Lyman grinned. He swung his fork over at Logan. "So, you'll apply to U of L for dental school, and we can all be together again, won't that be great?"

"Except me, maybe. But if you go to U of L, I'll totally stay in town, Kentucky at the most," Kerry said eagerly.

I put my hand on Logan's thigh, rubbing over the rough denim of his pants. "We'll see," I said in an even tone. I cut at my chicken and looked down the table at his mother. "We have a long time before we can handle grad school."

"That's not very positive," Lyman said, squinting at me. "You'd love Louisville, Mary Anne."

"I've loved my trips there," I replied. "But things are a lot more complicated than that. I'm applying to get my master's and undergrad degrees at the same time, so I'd be here for five years—that's Logan's first year of dental school."

"You can always do a year apart—I was away from the family for two years during Deserts Shield and Storm. It makes a family stronger, adversity does," Lyman declared. "Really, what's the problem? We're going home. Don't you want to come home with us?"

"I do, it's just…it's not that simple," Logan mumbled, slumping lower. "Mary Anne's doctors are here, and—"

"There are great doctors in the Lou," Rose added with a gentle smile. "And you know that I'd make sure that you were well taken care of at the university hospital."

"And, and? You could be best friends with our cousin Susie," Kerry gushed, leaning her elbows on the table. "You and Susie and Lana, that's Lewis's oldest sister. It'll be so much fun, Mary Anne! You'll totally love our family so much."

"It's perfect," Lyman boomed. "What's wrong with this? You are always so stubborn," he shot at his son, my husband. "You can 'live your own life' or whatever and be close to us, can't you?"

"Dad, I don't know, okay? Can't we just wait on this?" Logan asked, running his hand over his head.

"I just don't—" his father began, but I couldn't take it. The anger fired up my stomach, up my throat and over my tongue.

My fork rattled on my plate as I dropped it. "Stop it! Just stop!" I exploded. "I'm pregnant, okay? We found out after the wedding, and if I don't terminate this, everything changes, do you understand? We don't know what's going to happen in two years because we don't know what's going to happen in two days, alright? Leave him alone," I snapped, putting my arm around the slack elastic of Logan's shoulders.

There was a silence thicker than blood. It crept over my body and belted me down, thickening my body into a dull, deadened thing. The messy shock on the faces of this family, _my_ family, pummeled me. When Hunter coughed, I shook as though I had been slapped. I even touched my cheek, expecting to feel the rawness of it, feel the imprint of fingers on my skin.

"You're…gonna have a baby?" Hunter asked, his face so confused. "But you just got married."

"I know," Logan sighed. "It was…we didn't think that Mary Anne could ever have a baby. We didn't know."

Kerry's mouth kept hinging open and shut, open and shut. So her mother spoke first, her voice so soft, it killed me with the quiet of its knife. "You might end it? Why? God, why?" She put her face in her hands.

"Because Mary Anne is sick," Logan said, leaning his head on mine. "She can't get treatment until the second trimester, and that's a month away. I mean—Mom, please, please, she's sick, you have to understand," he begged, grabbing her arm. But his mother didn't move; she just sat there, looking into the press of her palms.

"Second trimester—that's three months," Kerry mumbled, staring at her fingers. "That means you had sex before you were married. You did, didn't you."

"Kay," he said, that word tripping in his throat. "Come on, don't."

Kerry stood up, her entire body rattling. "Give me your car keys," she said to Logan in a low voice. "I want to go to the hotel."

"Kerry," he pled. "Come on, don't be pissed at me."

"You lied to me," she said, her teeth chattering. "You said you were going to wait until you were married. You lied to me. I can't even look at you. You're a liar."

I am, too. My head drooped on my neck, and the dull rattle of Logan's keys stung my ears.

"I want to go, too," Hunter said, pushing back from the table. "I'm not hungry anymore." He followed Kerry out of the room, and the door clicked, the echo of metal on metal biting through the now-silence of the house.

"What have you done," Lyman mumbled, staring at his wife across the table. "What have you done, Logan?"

"It's not his fault," I snapped. "It was me, too. And it's my fault if I get an abortion. I'm pregnant with twins—it happens with women with my menstrual problems, and it's happening to me. Look at me," I insisted, waving my hand over my body. "I'm underweight, I have tumors in my lung, I have Hodgkin's lymphoma, okay? I don't know if I can do this, be a place for babies to grow and be healthy."

"They might not be healthy at all," I heard Rose cry, the muffle of her tears from under her hands.

"Well, if your body is so bad, then it will take care of itself. You'll miscarry. You don't need to get an abortion," Lyman retorted.

"Dad, get real," Logan said. "God, when a woman gets pregnant, her body stops taking care of her and starts taking care of the fetus. Fetuses. Her body is going to steal all of her strength and give it to the babies. Come on—don't you want Mary Anne to live?" His face began this seismic shift from the cowed, shame thing it had been into anger. The way he looked when he threw my father off of me. "Don't you?"

"Of course I do—I just—why weren't you more careful! I can't believe you! I told you, I _told_ you, you never do this to a girl, you never put her in this position!" Lyman erupted, slamming his fists on the table, making everything jump. Except for his wife, still sobbing, so oblivious to everything but those words we had strung together to yank her back over four years in time.

"I told _you_, it's not his fault," I spat. "I never once asked him to use protection because I thought I could never, ever get pregnant. Do you think we wanted this? Do you not understand that after what your family went through, we would ever want this? I lost my mother, I never had a mother, do you think I would ever want to _not_ be a mother?" I put my hand on his and took a deep breath. "When my father found out, he slapped me. Right here," I said, taking that hand and touching my face.

"You never touch a woman in anger," he said, reaching out and taking my hand again. "Never."

"It wasn't anger—it was more than that," I murmured, looking away. "I think he saw my mother in me. She left him with a baby, she left him so lost and scared, he's never really figured out to do with all of that. But my father hit me, and then he left. I haven't spoken to him in a week. I might not talk to him for a long time. And I might have to lose my babies," I said, forcing those words over the choke of my throat. "I might get really sick—I might die, just like that, there's no guarantee. And it's possible that all of this could happen before I speak to my father. Don't be like him."

I wiped at my eyes and said, "Don't be like him, Lyman. Please."

Rose stood up, walking away from the table and out into the backyard. Her husband's eyes followed her, but he looked back at us. "But you haven't made up your minds. Why? What are the reasons to keep the babies," he said slowly.

"Mary Anne could get a transplant, if they're healthy, have the right chromosomes—or it, I mean, the doctors think that if we have any chance to get a baby to term, there can only be one. But it could be a cure," Logan told him, putting his arms around me. "And that's a really good reason to go ahead with this."

"Have you talked to your priest yet?" his father asked.

Logan nodded. "He said that we need to follow our hearts, that God would forgive. Forgive me, not Mary Anne. Mary Anne is just fine," he insisted, so sharp with that tongue.

"You're fine, too," I sighed, resting my head on his chest. "Angel, you are."

We were quiet for a moment before Logan said, "Dad? What do we do?"

"I don't know, bird," Lyman sighed. "I don't. I don't want Mary Anne to die, I swear," he said, swallowing hard as his eyes brightened over with tears. "But I don't want her to be like your mom. To hate herself for doing something that's right."

Me, too.

I unwrapped myself from my husband, kissing his cheek before going outside to the hammock where Rose was swaying, her long hair drooping over her shoulders. She looked so young, maybe not much older than me, with that droop of golden hair, her feet scraping against the ground like a child trying to slow an out of control playground swing.

Her purse yawned open next to her, and she was slapping the bottom of a pack of cigarettes. "They're a lot cheaper here," she shrugged, biting down on the filter and igniting the tobacco.

"Logan's gonna see you smoking," I sighed, glancing behind me to the house, to where her son was trailing me outside, his father close behind.

"Whatever," she mumbled. Her husband sat down next to her, tugging out a cigarette of his own.

"I can't believe you two, after all of the lectures," Logan snorted. "Smoking is so bad for y'all."

"Do as I say, not as I do," she replied dully, sinking her body lower.

Logan sat down behind me. He scooted against my body so I could snuggle into him. I pulled his arms around me, his fingers drifting down to my stomach. If only I could just lose this pregnancy, if only it would just go away.

Go away, take my cure. Take my chance. Shouldn't I want that?

I closed my eyes and thought of my trip to the hospital last night. Had I been relieved when the doctor said it was normal? Or had I regretted it? Because it would have prevented a moment like this one, us at the feet of his broken, weary parents. They looked their age now, and more, time creeping over their bodies and faces and drooping them down. Thanks to me.

In silence, we all sat. My husband and I cradled together staring at another couple linked by rings that they had promised to us, their hands so tightly held, I could see their knuckles whiten in the pinking sun of the nearing twilight. Lyman kept brushing his wife's hair away from her face, and she would lean over with a lungful of smoke and speak into his ear something that made him soften, each time melting those words on a huff of gray air.

"We have four kids now," Lyman finally said with a small grin. "Does that mean we get five cigs a night?"

Rose shadowed a smile at him. "Maybe seven. Until those two are taken away." She rubbed her forehead, the glint of the stick of fire swinging around her head. "Oh, kids. This is such a mess."

"Are you mad at me?" Logan breathed, ducking his head into my neck. "Mom? Do you hate me?"

"No, of course not. Accidents happen," she sighed. "I know that if Mary Anne didn't have cancer, this wouldn't be an issue. I just—can't believe this has to happen to you, too," she whimpered, hitting her forehead with the heel of her palm. But she stopped, wiping her crying eyes again. "If the cancer can wait a month, if you can be okay and wait? Then you have to keep going until the amnio, Mary Anne. You have to. Keep going until they say that it's not right. That they aren't right."

She leaned over to her purse and pulled out her billfold. "Until that moment, everything is perfect," she whispered. "They are perfect inside of you until you are told otherwise. They are whole and beautiful and so full of promise, you can't think one bad thought about them. Don't think anything bad, Mary Anne, not now. This is the best time."

Taking another inhale, she tossed the cigarette to the ground and stamped it under her shoe, the fire hissing into death. Her fingers began to shake, knocking against the leather case of the wallet as she flipped behind the photos of her children, of all of them in their sports uniforms—Kerry in her swimsuit, Hunter in his lacrosse gear, Logan in the colors of our old high school.

"Will Kerry forgive me?" Logan said, pressing his eyes into the fabric of my dress.

"She just needs to scream for a bit, she'll probably come back here at midnight and yell at you before asking for a hug," Lyman told him. "You know her. She's a good little bird."

"She adores you—Hunter does, too," I added, touching his face, the rough hint of hair on his jaw. "Give them a few hours to blow off steam. It's hard when your heroes show that they can be wrong."

"I'm wrong all the time," he mumbled, rolling his head back and forth. "I'm wrong so much."

"I'll talk to them, I'll make it okay," Rose promised, pulling out a folded over thing from her billfold, photo paper once slick but its edges were split into a softness that spoke of constant touching. Those grayed, worn edges, the deep folds that creased over the image: this was something that was never forgotten in the pockets of her purse, not ever away from her touch for too long. How often did she look at this thing, how often she stare at it and cry?

This ultrasound photograph, a date and a name written on the back. _18 weeks, Ivy Nicolleta_. "When they do the ultrasound, you can't look," she said, staring at the picture. Her face was so blank, it frightened me. How could you wipe yourself from yourself? When your broken babies break you. "You can't look until they say it's okay."

"Rose?" I asked, my voice shaking.

"You can't look," Lyman repeated, putting his arm around his wife. "Don't look until they tell you that they see the baby, all of the baby—babies," he corrected. "Until they say, It all looks normal."

I reached out my hand, waiting for that picture. "Make them do a triple screen," Rose said, hesitating with that photo just beyond my waiting fingers. "They have to make sure that it won't happen with your babies, too. You can't do that to yourself or to them. End it, end it that very moment so you never have to see," she stated, gasping between so many of those words.

My fingers touched the edge of the picture, and she let it fall from her hands. "I'm so sorry that this is in your genes, _rondine_," she sniffed, digging her face into Lyman's shirt. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry that this is happening to you, too."

The ultrasound flopped back on its folds, so I had to lift it back into its battered rectangle shape. That feeling, the nausea that I had once assigned to the feel of chemo but now lined up with the feel of a baby, it charged up from my stomach. And Logan began to choke, this strangled sound that never made it up from the middle of his throat as he put his hands on the picture, too.

The rounded triangle of light where the dark outline of a baby's body lurked. The perfect shadow of fingers, of toes. Legs, flailing out from the body, showing that it was a girl. Arms with spread-open hands, as if waving with a gaiety at everyone who saw her. A yawning mouth, a pert nose. The bouncy line of eyes. So lively, the way she was floating there, so much hope in every line.

Except the half-moon of her head, stopping at her forehead and crumpling into a hollowed out cup until it reached her spine. Not a thing to be circled with a parent's waiting hand. A crushed thing, caved in like a dropped pumpkin.

I turned around and threw an arm around Logan's neck, just holding him as close as I could. I held that ultrasound in my hand until the meet of our bodies crushed my hand, and I tugged it out to curl my fingers against his back. That photo stayed there, suspended between the flatness of our chests, the press of our hearts.


	7. Chapter 6

I ate too much at dinner, but my hunger was a raving thing, guiding me to chicken and corn and too many pieces of bread. A heap of tiramisu the size of my husband's fist. But every time I told myself to stop, Lyman would hand me more, Rose would shove another piece of something at me.

"Eat," they would urge. And I did, staring at them across the table, meeting their worried eyes and hoping that I was smiling large enough to reassure them. That this would end better for us than for them.

After they left, we waited up in our room, dancing through the same pages in our books because the words on the paper wouldn't creep into our heads. Logan put his head in my lap, his eyes staring up at the ceiling, ticking off the time with each blink. Waiting, waiting. Dawn and Stacey came home in a swirl of perfume, giggling over their dinner.

"It was so awesome!" Stacey exclaimed, hurling her body on the bed. "We had this incredible discussion on neo-Keynesian utilization? So bitchin'. I really think that I want to study the warp of the Austrian School praexology in emerging markets in grad school? Like, how its reliance on human motivation actually feeds into a destabilization of democratic principles due to the autocratic schema, therefore undermining the ability to predict free market factors. I mean, since citizens in a dictatorship fundamentally lack autonomy. What do you think? Dr. Collins and Dr. Rolf and Dr. Saugarin are so, like, Come to Duke! Please!" She blushed, clutching her cheeks as she looked at Logan and me. "What do you think?"

"What, about the thing you just said that I don't understand or about coming to Duke?" Logan asked. "'Cause I have no clue what you explained, and I think Duke is creepy, so there you go."

I poked him. "Ignore him. Stacey, you sound brilliant, and I'd love for you to come here! Though, gosh, maybe you should apply to the London School of Economics or Harvard or something, not, you know, here."

Stacey giggled. "My grades aren't the highest in the world—I'm on Dean's List, but barely. But the next two years? Just doing econ and math stuff? I think I'll really be able to make a strike to get in wherever I want, as long as I keep pushing myself. This is so exciting, I just want to scream!" She sat up in a shot and grabbed a pillow from the head of the bed, pressing it to her face and hollering against the feathers.

Dawn clapped her hands. "She was fantastic—everyone wanted to talk to Stacey. And she was, hands down, the hottest chick in the room. Damn, girl, econ is hurting for babes. You should have seen their tongues hang out when she said she was a Dollie."

"I know, right?" Stacey laughed. "Econ is has more testosterone than a football locker room. I want to do a senior thesis incorporating feminist perspective into economic thought. My advisor back home and I are trying to hammer it out—there's too much that I want to say. Oh, guys," she beamed, "it was a really good night."

"Was it okay here?" Dawn asked, sitting down next to me. "We didn't see a text from you two."

I looked at Logan and shrugged. "It got really tense, but his parents came through. I was really expecting them to flip, but they…they just got sad. Kerry and Hunter were the ones who had a freak out, and that was over the whole premarital sex thing."

"Catholics," Dawn snorted, glaring at Logan.

He sighed. "My folks love Mary Anne. That boiled everything else away in the end."

"Your folks love you—and that was all that mattered in the end," I insisted, tracing the ridge of his brow bone with my thumb. "Angel, they love you. Almost as much as I do," I teased.

Dawn stretched, the sound of crackling rippling out of her back. "I am so ready for bed. It's nearly midnight—aren't you two wiped out?"

"We're gonna stay up for awhile," Logan shrugged, but his eyes went to the door. Waiting, waiting.

And they came, a little after twelve-thirty, the doorbell shrilling through the house. "Whomever it is, tell them to go away," Stacey shouted from behind their closed door.

"Unless they're hot or offering us money," Dawn added, and there was a rumble of laughter. They seemed okay, as close as ever, as though there wasn't a secret ghosting on my sister's smile, that private smile that dipped inside of her and saw Dr. Collins.

Logan flew from the bed and took the stairs four at a time, his feet thudding on the foyer. When the door opened, I heard the sharp snap of a girl's Southern voice, then three of those accented tongues overlapping in a hissing urgency. The voices moved from the door to the kitchen, rising and lowering like the tide with anger, with hurt, and then just quiet.

The stairs creaked as they came upstairs, Hunter coming into the bedroom first with a tray of barbeque curling up a honey-sweet pepper smell on its steam. "Kerry got us McDonalds, so we were hungry," he said, his nose still unstuffed. His eyes searched the room. "Where's the dog?"

"My sister's room," I said, patting the bed. "We thought you two would come, so we vacuumed and changed the linens—tell me if you want to go downstairs, okay?"

Hunter edged his body on the corner of the bed. "Mary Anne," he said, and I startled a bit at the clearness of my name. "Mom says that you and Logan aren't sinners and that it's not right to be mad. So I'm sorry."

"It's okay," I said, reaching across the bed to squeeze his hand. "I know it upset you."

"I am going to wait—Father Corsine says that it shows respect for God and His teachings to value the gift of your virginity as a part of the sacrament of marriage," Hunter told me, grabbing a piece of chicken and ripping off a hunk with his teeth. He waved at his mouth, the heat of it making his eyes water.

"I'm still waiting, too," Kerry announced, walking in with another tray with all of the side dishes piled on it. "I can't believe you didn't. I can't believe you lied to me!"

"Kerry, let it go," Logan said, his teeth gritted together. "I told you, I'm sorry. What do you want me to do, skywrite it?"

She frowned, sitting down on Logan's side of the bed, leaning against the wall. Her eyes slid over me with a weird slippery feel. "Like, when Mike Feld…you two were probably laughing at me, weren't you," she mumbled, grabbing a piece of cornbread and stuffing a large corner in her mouth.

"Laughing at you why?" I cried. I scooted forward so Logan could climb in bed behind me. "Kerry, I was so proud of you for standing up for yourself. You were so strong—there is no way that I would have had the courage to do that when I was in eighth grade, no freakin' way. Really, Kay, I totally admire the way that you—and you, Hunt—really believe in things and don't compromise."

"Really?" Hunter beamed, winding his tongue around his lips. "It's all about accepting Jesus as your Savior, Mary Anne. He gives you clarity and strength."

"Hunt? This isn't Sunday School," Logan said gently. "Mary Anne's not Catholic, she's not converting, don't push her."

"It's really wonderful, though, Mary Anne," Kerry smiled. "Faith is like the warmest blanket in the world."

I ran my fingers over the fleece that covered our bed and grinned. "I can see how that's a wonderful thing."

"Is there anything else you've lied to us about?" Hunter asked, narrowing his eyes at his brother. "You said you were our best friend. Best friends don't lie."

"I know," Logan sighed. His eyes rolled over to me. "_Tesorina_? Have I?"

"No," I insisted. "He really does tell you two everything. Guys, he didn't want to tell you because he knew how much it means to you, okay? But Logan tells you everything, I swear. I think he tells you guys more than even Davis or Shawn. That's how important you are."

Hunter grinned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "I tell you everything, too."

"I know—and let me say for the fiftieth time, Claire Pike? No," Logan snapped, jabbing his finger on the bed. "Just no."

Kerry picked at a loose piece of thread on the hem of her shirt. "I don't have anyone at St. Mark's that I trust like I trust you, Lo. Promise me you'll never lie to me again." Her eyes bit into me as she glanced between her brother and me. "Do you promise?"

He reached over and kissed her forehead. "I swear to God."

"I'll never lie to you either, Kerry," I promised, holding up three fingers like a Boy Scout. But I was lying to her brother, the man holding in me in his arms like a treasured thing. Lying to him, lying to Stacey—but I was trying to do good, right?

Logan had been, too.

We put in a movie, and the three of them plowed through the leftovers. Sometime after two, we collapsed into sleep, Hunter sprawled on the floor and snoring, this loud rattle that the noise of the fan barely smothered. Kerry fell asleep holding Logan's hand, and he carefully unthreaded his fingers from hers so he could turn around and curl around my body, a question mark shape around me. Questions, questions, no answers. Just us.

They left on Sunday, off to Fort Bragg to visit Sosie, and we stood in the doorway and waved his family goodbye, the four of them moving their arms furiously until they turned from sight. And then I dashed back up the stairs and heaved over the toilet until my body ached, and I slumped back to bed to sleep until the afternoon.

"You're just doing this to get out of shopping," Stacey said, narrowing her eyes. "There will be none of that. We're going tomorrow, so get all of this out of your system." She lifted the hem of my shirt and wagged her fingers over my belly. "Huh? You hear me? Mommy has to go shopping, so get your act together."

"I don't think it works like that," Dawn laughed, rubbing my feet.

"Remind me never to get pregnant then," Stacey said, watching me stagger back up and run to the bathroom again. As I rinsed out my mouth, I had to agree. Never again.

Or maybe not now, too, I thought, reaching to touch my thighs, a little surprised when I rubbed my fingers and didn't feel the slick spread of blood there.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Please, please, let me just go to Barnes and Noble," Logan begged, squatting in front of me with his hands clasped in prayer.

"Hell no—Stacey says you need a serious overhaul of your summer wardrobe, and your mom agreed, didn't she?" I giggled, yanking him back up.

"My mother is deranged," he snapped, but his face drooped. I rubbed his back; some jokes cut a little too fine, didn't they? _I must be insane!_ I'd say sometimes, my mouth freezing after those words tumbled out.

I must be. I rubbed my arms as if I were cold. Could that craziness crawl back into me? Would I know? It had been a week now without my medicine, could I stay okay? My hands shook so hard, I forced them together. They had told me that the greatest risk from the Effexor would be a low birth weight.

I knew about weight problems. I didn't want my children to know, too.

Dawn and Stacey were waiting at the doors of the mall, jittering around and laughing. When they saw us, Dawn rushed to me for a hug while Stacey groaned.

"Couldn't you, like, change?" she whined, clutching the sleeve of Logan's scrubs. "This is so lame, like, the 'Hi, I'm a fake doctor' message."

"No," he said tensely, "it's the, 'Hi, I had to leave work the second my last patient was done to get to Mary Anne's doctor's appointment, and I have to wear scrubs at work because of the whole potential of grossing up my clothes, so bite me, Stacey.' How's that for a message?"

"It's a little long," Stacey mused. She turned to me. "What did you guys decide?"

I kissed the side of Dawn's face and leaned my head against her shoulder. "We're going to keep going with the pregnancy. Dr. Wilks is really high on the idea of the transplant, so we're buying into it, too. I think he's looking past me and seeing the amazing article he'll publish on my case," I said, my words a touch too dry. "I'll start chemo in four weeks. Every week, I go in for screening, to see how much it's spreading," I said. "So, yeah, that's that."

Stacey let go of Logan's shirt and sighed. "How far has it spread since they found it?"

"My lungs are clear, so that's good news. They're gonna do a lumbar puncture next week, check my spinal fluid," I said, wincing at the memory of that pain. "But otherwise, it seems to just be in my lymph nodes." I rubbed a hand over my shirt, feeling the tracks on my skin, the bump of my catheter, still waiting. Still waiting.

Stacey pulled out a legal pad from her purse and frowned. "So, okay. I figured we could split up at first. I'll take care of Mr. Incompetence, Dawnie, you take Mary Anne to come up with a preliminary gathering of clothes. We need stuff that will be generous for the stomach and hide the catheter and the scars, so scoop necks, boat necks, things like that. Here are some bodice sketches I made of flattering shapes," she continued, ripping out a different page.

Dawn saluted, the page flapping like a wing in the air. "_Javol_, _mein_ Stacey," she barked. "Meet you at Anthropologie?"

"Indeed," Stacey nodded. She seized Logan by the wrist and pulled him towards the doors. "Come with me, darling, we need to get you to fall into the Gap."

He shot me an aggravated look, but I shrugged. Instead, I turned to my sister and grinned. "You and me time, sis."

"Yeah, okay, you and me know what to get," Dawn rolled her eyes, crumpling the paper into her pocket. We walked into the mall, the frigid breath of the air conditioning smacking us in the face. The heavy perfumes of The Body Shop to the left breathed juniper and mint and apricot in the air, swirling out like a luring hand. Dawn wrinkled her nose, though, and sneezed as we passed by.

She glanced at the mall directory and gave me a wicked grin. "So, yeah. I'm thinking we do a detour."

"And flout Stacey?" I gasped, putting a hand over my mouth. "She has a sixth sense about shopping. She'll feel the disturbance in the Force."

"Whatever, she can face off with me later," Dawn dismissed, tapping the plastic map in impatience. "I think you and me need to get the sexy back."

I squinted at her, pushing my glasses up my nose a bit. "What?"

"We're getting lingerie," she announced, thumbing towards the escalators.

Her determination pulled me in her wake, but I was hesitant. I had actually never bought anything like that before. I didn't have the soft mounds of breasts that so much of that kind of clothing worshiped and adored, I didn't have the need to wrap them in a secret of lace or a tease of silk. There was nothing. At night, I climbed into bed with only my skin, the truth of my cancer mapped out in a series of curving scars. All day I concealed the fact that I was a reshaped thing, this phoenix who blasted up from a disease. At a party with Logan's new friends back in the nascent days of our freshman year, just a week after we came back to each other for good, I overheard a clatch of cheerleaders snickering about me. _Have you seen Tywon's backup's girlfriend? The Duke girl? She has the boobs of a ten year old boy_, they cackled.

Logan found me standing out on the back porch, my hands tight around a soda. I was one of the few people not drinking; he was another—he said it was because he was too nervous about getting busted, but I knew. It was like his hair: he did it to match me. If I didn't drink at all, neither would he.

I told him what the girls said in a mumble, not crying, but staring ahead at the yellowed curve of city lights bouncing against the dark, clouded sky. It was the first full week in autumn, and in Stoneybrook, it would be cold, a tongue of Canadian air slicing down in the nighttime. But not here, still warm and almost cocky in its cling to summer.

"I'm gonna talk to them," he said, plunking his soda down on the railing. "No one fucks with you like that, I'm sorry."

"Don't fight my battles," I warned, hooking a finger in the band of his watch. "I don't care."

"Yes, you do, and it's not your battle. If these are my friends? Then they better learn that that ain't friendship where we're from," he stated.

He left me with a kiss and an air of anger as he strode back into the house, clenching his jaw into a hard mass of sharp squaring lines. And I told myself, _I don't care, I don't care_.

But I started wearing my sweaters, bulky shapeless things, the next day. Sweaters that he would look at and sigh, ripping them off of me the moment we were alone. Because he wanted to see the truth of me. So I never bothered to hide it—not even under fabric so delicate, every wrinkle in skin, every flaw, could be seen with a gauzy film barely shading it from sight.

Dawn had lingerie, though. But obviously not enough, from the fawning look in her eye as we approached the store. She pointed at a negligee in the window, the behind on the panties fluffed with rows of puffy lace. "So that's Victoria's Secret. Ass ruffles," Dawn said with a bemused nod.

"Yeah, that's not on my list of needs," I told her with a sigh. "Dawnie, I don't need lingerie."

"Listen up, here, bride, you _think_ you don't need it. Your man is turned on by you alone, blah blah. Well, that's fine and good, but trust me. You appear in the door with something that says, This is for you, and they turn into gush," Dawn sighed, swinging her short hair around her face.

"My body says, This is for you," I replied, giving her a skeptical look.

Dawn yawned. "Oh, May. Think about it this way. What if you wore your red dress to bed. What does that do to him?"

Oh. _Oh_. "I get it," I grinned, pressing my hands to my face to hide my blush. "But nothing trashy. That's not me."

"I know," she moaned. "It's so unfortunate. Alright, let's enter the sanctorum." She skipped into the store, tracing her hand over a row of neon-shaded bras before dashing into a section with pink walls and gothic light fixtures. "Ooo, the Betsey Johnson collection," Dawn fawned, seizing a confection of purple with a cinched corset and an overlap of ruffling satin that seemed like a miniskirt. "Excellent."

"Not me," I declared.

"Yeah, hi, this is for me. My torrid summer romance will need a little mood clothing," she declared.

I held up a yellow bra and panty set, linked together with gold rings. "Are you sure that you're going to sleep with him?"

"May, it's a given," Dawn announced. "He doesn't want a relationship, either. It's perfect: it's a fuck buddy that you can actually talk to between go-rounds."

I shrugged, watching her cluck over another purple negligee. "It just seemed like you two had a real date on Saturday. If you were really just in it for the sex, why bother?"

Dawn paused, her fingers wrapped up in the ties of the camisole. "I don't know, honestly. I will say that I went from thinking he was just sexy to thinking he was a really cool, fun guy. It made me want him more, getting to know him. Maybe that's the trick—when you know them, being together is better. Maybe. I'm not sure. All I know is, I like him, and I think this is going to be really fun."

"I hope so," I sighed, watching her seize a black leotard made of a mesh-like lace, completely exposing the skin it would hold in its form. It had a long stretch of ribbon lacing it into place, running from the neckline down to the crotch, bound in a bow between the area of the breasts.

I would look hideous in it. On my sister, it would turn her into a goddess.

"Mine," she sang, slinging it over her arm.

She picked out two other filmy pieces, the purple corset and a blue swirl of strategically placed ribbon, before shuttling me into another area of the store, the lights brighter, the music peppier. "Alrighty. Something more May," she muttered, staring at the clothes on the wall.

"How about a too-big sweatshirt and a pair of wool thigh highs? That's what I wear to bed in the winter," I giggled, brushing my hand over a nightgown with a vomit of roses on the bodice.

Dawn grabbed a pink silk gown, the hem petaling against the middle of my thighs. "Not bad," she said, tipping her head.

"Not special," I answered. "And pink is not exactly my thing."

She cajoled me into a blue cousin of that gown, a ribbon defining the borders. "This one shows off your back," Dawn explained, her finger swirling over the large dip, shaped like a U. "Not your boobs. Which is good. No saggage."

"Right," I replied. Saggage? That sounded like especially droopy luggage.

As I turned from her with a swirl of boredom, I saw it. The reverse of my wedding dress, white with red polka dots. It hung from the hanger on a delicate floss of white piping that snaked down to etch out a sweetheart neckline. The gown rode down the line of the body, ending in a scalloped edge of a hem that rode above a fluff of red tulle that reminded me of a ballerina.

"This is perfect," I breathed, grabbing the one that was in my size.

"Yeah," Dawn beamed. "Let's go play dress up sex Barbies."

I hesitated at that, but I followed her again. She didn't come out of the room when she tried on the see-through piece, but I heard her cackle with glee. I guess it was a keeper. The blue gown was sweet on me, and the way that it billowed down from the straps suggested that I could wear it even as my stomach grew. The other negligee, the perfect one, that would have to be retired in a month or so.

"Lemme see!" Dawn squealed, banging on my door. I opened it, nudging out in the polka dot gown, facing her clad in the purple corset, the mock skirt of it barely concealing the triangle of her public bone.

"It's fabulous," I told her, grabbing the dangling ribbons from its top. "You have to get it."

"Oh, I am," she snickered. "Damn, this is gonna shred Lee. Remind me to be, like, at Henry's the first time you whip it out. I do not want to hear him slobbering all over you."

"Be nice," I snapped. "He's your brother now, Dawnie."

She shuddered. "Ew."

"Why don't you like him?" I frowned, crossing my arms over my chest.

Dawn sighed, "I don't _not_ like him. He's a sweetheart, really, and I love that he loves you so much, but I, like…Logan's just the kind of guy that I don't want, right? He beats himself up to death over mistakes, he never seems satisfied with anything that he does, and, not to be mean here, you totally have him whipped."

"I do not!" I bristled, thrusting my hands on my hips.

"Yeah, babe, you do," Dawn snickered. "You're the only person who tells him that he is a capital-G good man, and he'd probably slit his wrists before ever hurting you. I just think that's a bit weak, that's all."

Slit his wrists. "If I died—Dawn, you don't think…Dawn?" I whimpered, clutching hard at my own body.

"May, no—oh, God, don't think that," she said sharply, shaking me by the shoulders. "I don't think he would, no—and damn, if there was a baby? There's no way he would. And seriously, I wouldn't let him. I'd kick his cracker ass from here to Stoneybrook and back if he tried," she declared, zooming her finger around in a line. But her eyes widened as she said, "You think he would, don't you."

"I don't know," I whispered. "Not if there was a baby, he wouldn't. But…" I let my hands fly down to my belly, cloaked in the creamy silk. I needed one of these baby's blood for a cure—but for something else now. They had to live so I might live; they had to live so he would have to if I didn't.

I hadn't been sure—I agreed with Dr. Wilks to keep going because I believed in his firmness that a transplant was a solution. I believed in my husband's desire for me to have a cure. Following, following—I followed them into choosing this. But I knew now.

I was going to have a baby. No matter what.

"I want to tell him—about Dr. Collins," I blurted out. "He has to know. I mean, we're using his teammate as cover. If he overhears you and Stace talking about 'Duncan,' he'll totally muck stuff up for you."

Dawn gave me a hard look. "Uh, right. You want to tell him because you hate lying. What about the blood, huh?"

I shrugged. "I'll tell him that, too. Come on, Dawn, he won't say anything. If he's so 'whipped,' he'll keep it a secret for us, too." I scowled. "And he is not whipped. I do everything he asks, too."

"Right, like doing the dishes is such a hardship," Dawn snorted. She tapped her foot on the floor, her skirt shaking with the movement. "Fine. Tell him—because he needs to get my back on the Duncan thing, okay? If he can't keep it a secret, I mean it, I'll kill him." She looked at me, unblinking. "I'm not kidding. I'll kill Logan, he won't know what hit him."

My breath leaped down into my stomach, struggling back up my throat. "Okay," I whispered, ducking my head.

"Hey. You look really beautiful right now," Dawn murmured, touching my hair. "Like a sexy angel."

"Me?" I gasped. "Dawn! Look at you—your body is slammin'. You look just incredible."

"And edible, I hope," she giggled, twirling around, showing off the tiny thong she was wearing. My sister sure was confident about how she looked. When I hugged her, I hoped some of that would rub onto me, into me, past all of my insecurities and hurt parts.

We left the store with small plastic bags, our purchases nestled deep in tissue scented like freesia. Dawn took my hand, and the two of us nearly skipped down the length of the mall to the store that she and Stacey had picked. I had bought dresses here at Anthropologie before—I liked how they were demure but not boring. Once, in middle school, I cut off all of my hair and took a step forward, edging into something like sexiness. A red dress, a swirl of daring. I loved the feel of it on my skin, that promise of a Mary Anne who wanted to dive deep past her insecurities and find a boldness. Bold like crimson on a developing body, crimson like want.

I shied back from that, though, returning to my khakis and sweet sweater sets. But not anymore—I liked being different, just a little. Just enough.

Dawn had piled her arms full of dresses by the time Stacey strode into the store. "Your boy is so set," Stacey announced with a smug toss of her hair. "Now he has shirts that say something other than 'Nike' or 'UNC' on them."

"Wow," I whistled. "Nice work, Stace."

"I try my best," she smiled. "Alrighty, we gotta get you situated. Oh, God, Dawn, that color will be awful on Mary Anne!" she whined, grabbing a mustard colored corduroy from the pile and tossing it into the floor.

The girls plied me into the changing area, sitting on a low velvet chaise as I made a circuit from my dressing booth to the mirrors and back. It was hard—some dresses hid my catheter but would be too tight on my belly. Some were flowing confections that showed the world the hurt on my chest. But we managed to find four dresses that worked, that I liked, that were Mary Anne, as well as three tops that wilted in a generous way over my stomach.

"This should get you all the way to the seventh month, Mary Anne—you'll need to keep getting bigger jeans, but that's totally easy," Stacey nodded. "I just want you to be stylish, you know? Dawnie and me'll hit San Fran in August and send you more stuff."

"You don't have to do that," I protested, but the look on their faces clearly said, _It's an excuse to shop, moron_.

Well, then, who was I to stand in the way of the McGilling?

She seemed so in her element, that sad, hesitant Stacey from before melted away into a confident, happy girl. She tugged at her tight red shirt, the illustration of a pair of boots under an elaborate swirl that spelled _Dollie_ across her breasts. Stacey had it all: so smart, one of the dance team girls at Stanford, so pretty. What was going on with her?

I would do anything to be like that—to have a talent that came so easy. I felt a beading of sweat on my forehead; I had so much work to do on my research project back at home. It was so much work—I loved it, but it took all of my energy to peek into those worlds, those horrible dreams that seemed to show that an insidious insanity was something that never slept.

I knew that you could be tortured in your dreams, I did. I hadn't had a nightmare in years; I had left behind the visions of fire, of being murdered by my mother back in the haze of high school. But they could come back, couldn't they? Riding on the emptiness in my blood, where my medicine should stand guard, they could come back.

Logan had let me sleep with the lights on before, to keep those dreams away in the glare of the bright lamps. Maybe I should start doing that again. Just in case. I looked down my body; would my babies see those nightmares, too?

The room flooded over in an orange scent, and my knees buckled. Mom. Mom, Mom, what do you know? Mommy, I'm so scared, I have so much to lose.

But she knew this. Because she had lost it all.

I rubbed my eyes and stepped forward to the cash register to pay. Dawn plucked my debit card out of my hand and fished the credit card that Dad had given me for emergencies. Not for luxury, not for gifts—_emergencies_. That was a lesson I had learned. Generosity was a dangerous thing. But Dawn slid that card over the counter with a wicked grin.

"Dawnie, that's not my money," I said in a low voice.

"Call it retribution," she answered, touching my cheek. "He's lucky we didn't put the Victoria's Secret stuff on that card. Damn, we should have!"

I laughed, signing the receipt and taking the bulging bag. Dawn snatched it from my hands and swung it in the air as we met Stacey at the entrance.

"I made Logan go change," Stacey smirked, "so he said he'd meet us at the bookstore."

"No shit," Dawn snarked, linking her arm with Stacey's. "So, what are you doing tonight?"

"Studying," she sighed. "I want an A in the class, and I'll work eight hours a day for it if I have to. Dr. Collins said he'd have lunch with me tomorrow to talk about my feminist economics ideas—you should so come, you are so the Women's Studies goddess."

Dawn shrugged. "If you want, I can suffer." Oh, sure. "I'm gonna go on out tonight, though, if you don't mind."

"Duncan again?" Stacey gasped. "Dude! I want to meet him!"

I saw Dawn's back ripple up in tension, but her head shook her hair into a wave that smacked Stacey on the cheek. "He's really paranoid about Lee. And he works all day at his internship. I'm totally in the selfish stage of the relationship—lemme get him to sleep with me, and then we'll talk meeting."

Stacey glanced back at me. "You've met him, right?"

Be cool, Mary Anne, I warned myself, flickering my eyes on the side of Dawn's face. "Yeah. He's really cute. Commitment-phobe, though," I shrugged. That much was true: Duncan Morris was a well-known man at Logan's school, bedding those desperate cloying girls who grouped to the team, fawning over the guys at parties and hurling their willing bodies at whatever guy would breathe in their direction.

At those parties, Logan's arm would stay belted around my waist. Not to reassure me—to protect _him_.

"Are you scared that meeting the best friend would chase him off?" Stacey surmised, raising an eyebrow at Dawn.

Sighing, Dawn dropped her head. "A little. I just want a summer fling!"

"Well, fine, I'll give you a couple weeks, but then I want to meet him. I mean, Dawnie, the basketball thing is hot and stuff, but we need to make sure that he meets the high standards that a babe like you deserves."

"What standards are those?" I laughed as we exited the mall and walked across the outdoor pavilion to the bookstore. "Is capable of breathing?"

"Oh, ha ha, May," Dawn snapped. "Don't be a hater just 'cause you'll never, ever get to date or sleep with another guy again. Ever."

I blinked. "Gosh, wow, Dawn, when you put it like that? I'm so rushing out for a divorce."

"And become May, the Town Bicycle: every guy'll get a ride," Stacey cackled, holding open the door to Barnes and Noble. "Be sure to charge 'em. That'll make it good and classy."

"I'll put it on my resume," I nodded, biting down on my lip to not laugh in the hushed store. I surveyed the large room, the maze of shelves and sections. If I knew Logan, he'd be in one of four places. I went to the sports section first—nothing. Not in biographies, either. But I found him in fiction, blocking the whole aisle as he sat in front of the "S" authors. He looked up and gave me a gleeful smile.

"Look," he breathed, closing a book around his finger. "It's a new cover design."

"Logan," I said, dipping the word in patience, "you own six copies of _East of Eden_. I get that it's your favorite book and all, but at some point, you need to realize that you have a problem."

"But, but," he stammered, opening it up, "it has a different foreword! And a new cover!"

"You have the darned book memorized at this point," I scolded, reaching over and squeezing the crown of his head. "You are a really twisted man, do you know that?"

"And you married me," he said, rocking his eyes back and forth. "Foolish you."

"One day, Steinbeck is gonna raise up from the grave and say, like, Get a life," I giggled as he hauled himself to his feet.

"Zombie Steinbeck?" he said. He shrugged. "I'd totally let him eat my brains."

I took the books from his hand, shuffling from the Steinbeck to a biography of some football coach named Paterno to a thin book with gold lettering, "_How to Dress for Every Occasion by The Pope_," I read with a laugh.

"I thought I'd send it to Kerry. I bet she'll get a huge kick out of it," he told me, taking my hand. He tugged me to a stop and looked down at the bag full of clothes that Stacey had picked for him. "I, um, got something. I don't want you to be mad, though."

_Angel, I bled the other night and lied to you about it. Don't be mad at _me.

This wasn't the time for that, though. I didn't know when it would be right to tell him that. "What is it?" I asked, watching him shift from foot to foot.

His hand hovered over the yawn of the bag. "Um," he said, chewing on the inside of his lip, "I was coming back from changing?" he began, scowling at the shirt and slacks on his body. "And I walked by this store, and I couldn't help it. I went in. 'Cause sometimes, I can't believe that this is real, you know? And I have to remind myself that it's real, and it hit me right then, like, we're gonna have a baby. So, I went in—and, I got something," he said, the words halting and then jumbling together, this verbal train wreck. The hand that held the bag was clenching so tight, his fingertips were turning purple.

"What did you get?" I prodded, touching that waiting hand.

"This," he mumbled, stuffing his hand into the bag and pulling out a small, almost comically small pair of pajamas. Soft, somewhere between terry cloth and chenille, something to be rubbed against cheeks and take on the milky smell of baby powder and sweet lotion. It was a pale pistachio, not for a boy or for a girl. For either, for whichever would come.

For a baby, a brand new baby so small that it could fit in the palm of his hand.

I reached around to his back and pressed my fingers against the line of his shoulder blade, and he dropped his head down so I could kiss him. "It's so tiny," I breathed into the sharp mint scent of his mouth.

"I know," he whispered. "I'm afraid I'll break the baby."

"Break it like an egg," I grinned, touching his nose with mine. "We should really discuss that incident and learn from it."

His face blanked and then filled with horror. "Oh, God, _that_. Terrific. I can barely remember that at all—I just remember you being a bad mommy."

I slapped his arm. "That's it, I hope you find the couch comfortable tonight."

"It'll be fabulous," he drawled, and I laughed, wrapping both of my arms around the crook of his left elbow as we began to wander through the section, wandering without thought and ending at the boundary of the children's section. We found ourselves there and squatted down in silence in front of the parenting books. I grabbed one, one of those books that all pregnant women seem to have, a drawing of a lady with a too-round belly sitting in a rocking chair. She looked so serene—because she had knowledge. She knew what to do. Then my hands found another title, and I laughed: _Better Not Screw _This _Up_, it declared. I needed that one, too.

Pajamas, books, an odd flutter of nausea. This was real. This was happening. These are all of the little things that thread together that would lead to a big thing, a big belly that held in it a small thing that would change my life.

Save my life?

He took the books from my hand and added them to his own as we walked towards the front of the store to pay, where Dawn was tapping her foot in impatience while edging her eyes in a bored fashion around the store.

"Stacey and me are gonna go back to the mall and shop—can we ditch May with you?" she asked him, thumbing at the doors.

"I'm forever wounded," I pouted, and Dawn patted my head. She waited for Logan to walk over to the cash registers before she spoke.

She took a step forward. "Thanks for covering for me."

"No prob, sis," I answered, giving her a solemn nod. She took in a deep breath and wiggled her eyebrows as Stacey walked up with a thick fashion magazine. The two of them waved goodbye and walked away, their bodies so close, they looked knitted together as they made their way back to the mall.

I felt a dull stab of something in my chest—not jealousy, but something sticky and full of fear. But for what?

I let that go, though, on our ride home, my legs curled on the bench of the front seat of his car, his hands resting on my calves and thumbing an orbit around my ankle. He had noticed the bag from the lingerie store, and his face had flamed in want at the sight of it. I had an idea—I would put on that polka dot gown, lure him upstairs, cover him in me and how much I loved him, and then I would tell him about the bleeding.

That's how it would work. That's how I could make it right.

When we pulled up the house, though, Logan hit the brake a bit too hard. "Who's that?" he said, narrowing his eyes.

I looked from my window across him to glance at our front door. Sitting on a large cardboard box was a boy huffing on a cigarette, his face set in a dark, shadowed scowl. I reached into my purse and pulled out my glasses so I could get a better look at his face, staring at his power blonde hair and nearly cocoa tan.

"Oh, my God," I breathed as the car pulled to a stop. "That's Jeff."


	8. Chapter 7

Jeff slept like a rock on the air mattress, just a heap of blonde and bone in the corner of the study. I heard him wake sometime deep in the night, clanking around the kitchen and turning up the television too loud. He had slumped away from my hug when I got out of the car, mumbling something about jet leg and needing a nap.

"Isn't it earlier in California?" Logan had hissed, but I shrugged. Dawn was the same way, coming off the airplane and rocketing into bed.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him as I unfurled the mattress while Logan grabbed all of our work and moved it into the dining room. "Do your folks know?"

"No, Mary Anne, I ran away," Jeff sneered. "Of course they know. Mom and Richard are gonna pick me up on Friday on their way back to stupid ass Stoneybrook. I just changed my flight. I was ready to get out of LA, and Dawn said I was welcome here. Aren't I?" he challenged, jutting his chin into the air.

I paused for a moment before plugging in the motor on the pump. "Well, of course you are. But, you know, a vague invitation from Dawn isn't exactly calling me up and saying, 'Hey, I'm coming to Carolina.' I mean, things are a bit crazy around here, it would have been nice to get a bit of warning."

"Dawn said you were a control freak," he mumbled, tossing his duffle bag into a chair.

I blinked at him. Dawn said that? And he _repeated_ it?

Once the mattress was inflated, he arched an eyebrow. "Um, I'm cool now, Mary Anne. You can go. Thanks. Have Dawn wake me when she gets home."

But Dawn didn't come home. She was out with "Duncan." I tried her cell phone, but it clicked straight over to voicemail each time. It was off, it seemed. I wondered if she had already traipsed her body in that purple negligee, if this is how it would be all summer. So much for sisterly bonding.

Stacey came home alone, then, from the mall and staggered back when I told her that Jeff was here. "No shit," she snorted, looking at the closed study door. "He's not getting along very well with his dad and Carol. Especially Carol." Stacey rolled her eyes. "Your family is so drama."

"It's a regular episode of _Days of Our Lives_," I shrugged. "Speaking of? Your friend, Dan? His new character is a jerk."

"I know—he plays a villain well, doesn't he?" Stacey grinned. "He said he took notes from me. It's flattering—frightening, but flattering."

"You want frightening?" Logan said, jumping down the last step on the stairs. He waved a bottle of purple juice in Stacey's face. "Jeff was sitting on a box from Mariah Schillabar. If that isn't an omen, I don't know what is."

"Oh, Wally Juice," Stacey grinned. "Why is it purple?"

He glared at it. "I'm not sure, but with Ry? The less you ask, the better off you are."

That seemed true here, too.

Dawn came home the next day after Stacey left for class. I was alone in the house—well, it was just me and the silent stepbrother ensconced in the study. "He didn't sleep with me!" Dawn roared. "He wanted to keep talking!" She marched into the kitchen and grabbed a banana, raging the peel from the body of the fruit. "We watched a game on TV, and then a movie, and only fell asleep together. If Henry hadn't made out with me for, like, five hours, I swear, I would have to write him off as gay."

"You're really quick about that," I said with a crooked smile, taking a hesitant bite of my toast. Stay down, I willed. I had thrown up once already. Not again, please.

I had worked so hard for this weight, please.

I took a deep breath as I walked over to the back door to let J.D. inside. "So. Your brother showed up yesterday. He's been asleep in the study ever since."

"Oh, bitchin'! I told him to come straight here, but he was all like, Ehhh, effort. That's great," she exclaimed, her face tight with happiness. I swallowed down the urge to scold her for not telling me, but I held it back, I held it down. Still.

"He's being a jerk," I thudded, snapping the door shut.

Dawn flapped her hand at me. "Jet lag plus teenage boy equals surly. Come on, May, just be cool, okay?"

"You mean, don't be a control freak?" I answered, tilting my head at her.

Putting her hands on her hips, Dawn glared at me. "You have the thinnest fucking skin on the planet. Or is it just with me?"

"Well, you love to find my flaws," I said in a light tone, freezing my mouth.

"Like you don't see mine—you think I'm a bad person for lying to Stacey. I mean, look how fast you folded on keeping a little something from your precious angel," Dawn shot back, stepping on that nickname too hard. "You're getting just as neurotic as he is about being 'good.' You both need a really stiff drink/"

I put my hands on my stomach. "Great idea, Dawn," I smarmed.

"Why are we fighting?" she snapped. "Seriously, why? You look tired—you have huge circles under your eyes, May. And when you're overtired, you become such a bitch. How about we stop this before we say shit that we can't take back because we're being ridiculous, okay? Let's stop and just, like, separate. I'm gonna go do a little writing before lunch. Why don't you take a bath or something?"

I shuffled my feet over the faded orange tiles of the floor. "Alright," I relented. I bit back the urge to add, _See? How much of a control freak can I be if I agree to what you say?_

As I walked up the stairs, I heard Dawn run into the study and her brother's voice burst to life. He actually seemed happy—more than that. He actually seemed to register an emotion other than resentment, anger, annoyance.

Jeff and I weren't exactly close. We weren't exactly _anything_, just two people bound by our parents. He had always seemed too eager to help Dawn out with plots against me, always jumping too fast to be on her side. Not even her side—whatever side I was on, he would take the reverse. During my first time with cancer, he would send cards; there would be generous bouquets of flowers with cards that read, "From Jeff and the rest of the Schafers." Flowers I was certain he had never picked, flowers I was certain he only knew about in the context of his father and stepmother saying, _We bought Mary Anne flowers again_.

_Again?_ I could picture him saying. _How many does she need?_

I hoped that he hadn't. But somehow, those words echoed in my ears so real that I shuddered.

I poured in seven capfuls of bubble bath, watching the soap soufflé over the lip of the tub. I lay there, buried by the white foam, my head resting on a roll of a towel, and tried to let go. Jeff was stress, Jeff was making this house smaller. It's what Logan had said last night: "Remember how we said that this was our perfect little house? Operative word—little." One week, one week. Maybe I could show Jeff that I wasn't so bad. Maybe I could convince him that I could be his sister, too.

Funny. Dawn and I had been calling each other sister since the moment of our parents' wedding. And Kerry and Hunter were so quick to seize that word, kissing me goodbye on Sunday morning with that name on their lips. But Jeff and I, Jeff and I—we were tied together by matrimony, and we both chafed under that bind.

Maybe, maybe.

Baby. _Babies._ I stared down at my slippery body, the bubbles slowly evaporating in a crinkle down to the surface of the water. There was still barely a whisper, barely an idea of something under my skin.

When I got out of the bath, wrapped up in robe of soft mint chenille, I shuffled back downstairs and bumped right into Jeff, his hands swarming over the dream journals I had left on the table after my work last night.

"What are these?" he asked, flipping through one of the books.

I ran over and slapped the cover shut. "Those are private, Jeff. They're confidential."

And you don't want to see them. I glanced at the journal under my fingers. _I was a tornado, and I just decimated my whole town. I swallowed my high school, and I could see my favorite teacher, Ms. Giles, and all of my friends just being shredded by my wind. They couldn't escape me, and I tossed them to the ground, and their bodies were broken, just billions of pieces of who they used to be. I woke up then, but my whole body felt like it was whirling for an hour after. And then I had a really bad manic day—I was the tornado all day long. I couldn't shake it._

My hand jumped away as Jeff snorted. "Confidential? Like, you work for the CIA now?"

"No," I said, trying not to be too sharp. Trying to be like a sister and not a stranger. "It's for my work in the psych department. These are dream journals of patients who are, like, participating in a research project on a possible connection between dreamed behavior and actual mental health. Like, if you have a dream in which you are being destructive or damaging or something, does that mean that your behavior in the next day will mirror the dream? It could be a way for bipolar patients to predict whether they will have a manic or depressive episode," I explained.

"But you don't know," Jeff concluded.

I shook my head. "Not yet. We've been doing this since April, so it's still too early to tell. But I think that there is a definite relationship." I looked down at the books and sighed. "Our brains speak to us in our sleep, for sure."

My mother did, too.

Last night, I dreamed of painting, painting the room where Stacey and Dawn slept in a bright blast of sunshine yellow. When my brush passed over the walls in that lemon shade, a menagerie of circus animals popped out, blooming from the baseboards and stretching waist high. Giraffes with spindly, waifish legs; elephants with spiraled up trunks; a bear bouncing onto his left leg, clapping his paws together.

A nursery.

My mother stood behind me and laid her hands on the walls; her palm was dry, though, when she pulled away. "I painted your room pink," she said.

"I know," I answered, dropping the brush onto the tray.

"We bought big pictures of nursery rhyme characters, and I attached these big ribbons, and we hung them around your crib. There was a sale at the Laura Ashley outlet mall down by the city, and I was so excited to see all of the linens, I bought not just the bunting for the crib, but I got sheets for your first bed, too. There was a dust ruffle so thick, it reminded me of Scarlet O'Hara's petticoats," she smiled, rubbing her fingers together.

Looking down at my feet, my red toenails gleaming, I murmured, "I hated that room."

"It was for a little girl," Mom told me, "not a growing one."

I touched my stomach. "Is one a girl? Are both of them? Are they both healthy or not? Mom, I'm going to have to pick between them. Tell me, please, do you know which one I should keep?"

"Mothers always know," she said with a gentle smile. "You'll know."

"How?" I gasped. "How do I choose?"

"You're sick," Mom sighed, sinking down on the floor. "I was sick, you are sick."

I rubbed my forehead. "Yes, I am. Mom, what do I do?"

"Eat," she suggested, opening her palm and showing me three lush strawberries, the red of them deep like hearts. Like Barbara's hair, a cherried thing of curls. Strawberries, the scent of her shampoo. I held that fruit to my chest and spun around the room. Barbara? Was she here?

I raced into the hallway and looked into my bedroom, into the bathroom. In the linen closet. Nothing. When I glanced down the stairs, I saw Logan sitting there in the foyer, his legs clutched tight in a bend, head slumped on his knees.

He was staring up at me.

When I woke, he was asleep, his head nestled in the crook of my neck. His lips were so warm, right there against my skin. I pinched his ear until he woke up.

"What?" he mumbled, those bright eyes of his still shut.

"Nothing—I just…just nothing," I breathed, pulling him tighter.

Then the sound of a television leapt to life downstairs, the crash of a cabinet slamming shut on its hinges. Noise, noise, filing up our little house. Jeff, lurking below.

Jeff, here. I stared at my stepbrother across the table, waiting for him to say something back. But he kept staring down at the journals. He sighed, though, and looked at the ceiling. "So, Dawn's trying to write a book, huh?"

"She works on it all morning while Stacey's at class," I shrugged, putting the journals back into the box for Jeremy. My hand froze, and I looked up at him. "She cries sometimes over it. She says that she's not sad, but remembering it all is tough."

"I bet," he muttered. "Vista's creepy now. I'm glad that they gave us the option of staying at Monroe."

"How are things there?" I asked.

Jeff rolled his eyes, slumping down onto the bench. He put his head on his folded arms. "High school blows. I hate it, really, all of my classes are total wastes. The only thing that makes it bearable are the sports."

"What are you playing now?" I replied, sitting down across from him.

He frowned, his mouth drooping. "Dawn doesn't tell you?"

"Well, neither do you," I reminded him in a voice that sounded a bit too much like a spike.

And he felt it, glaring at me. "Well, whose fault is that? I don't see you calling me up just to chat."

"Because it's quite clear that you don't want to just 'chat' with me—whenever you're in Stoneybrook, you're practically living at the Pike house," I shot back, pressing my fingers against the table. Bracing myself.

"Like you're so innocent," he spat. "The past few summers, all you did was work at those cancer camps, like you were still sick. And at Christmas? You spent three days with us before skipping off with your high school best friends for a whole week."

"Our friend Barbara was killed a year ago on December twenty-eighth," I snapped. "We went to be together because we missed her."

His eyes narrowed into knives. "Cancer camp, dead friends—Jesus, Mary Anne, it's like you're obsessed with dying. Are you sure you want to get better?"

All of the blood drained out of my face, my hands, plummeting into my stomach and rocking there until I began to lose my balance. I felt my spine buckle, and I put my forehead on the table, breathing as deep as I could over the knot in my throat. It was like there was a hand across my larynx, forcing everything shut. My eyes began clouding over, sprinkling with a sharp light, and I started to hyperventilate.

Jeff's hands were on my back, rubbing circles into the blocks of muscle. "Mary Anne, hey, relax. I'm sorry, I didn't mean it. Come on, just take a breath, okay?"

I let out a puff of air and scrambled for more. The motion over my shoulder blades began to calm me, and I leaned back against the pressure of his palms. "I want to get better," I gasped, twisting back to look at him, gazing up his wiry frame.

"I know you do," he mumbled, glancing over my eyes before looking away. "I was angry at you, I'm sorry."

"Why don't you like me?" I asked.

Jeff flickered his gaze on my eyes again. But he didn't speak, not a word. Nothing for me to know. He cleared his throat and asked, "So, where's Logan right now?"

I blinked at him, shaking my head a bit to knock the fuzziness out. I took a few deep inhales, just enough to get my lungs, my throat open again. Why would he care about Logan? He certainly didn't give two thoughts about me. Still, I grabbed my day planner. "What day is it, Tuesday?" I said, flipping it open. "Um, he's at the dental clinic this morning, then he works out this afternoon with some of his teammates and some girls from the women's team. He'll be home for dinner."

Jeff took a step back and raised an eyebrow. He slumped into the chair next to me and said in a dripping tone, "You write down his _schedule_?"

"Yes," I said, narrowing my eyes at him. "If something happens to me, it's important that you—well, not you, but Dawn or Stacey—can find him. Actually," I sighed, closing the pages to show him the built-in billfold. "Here, you should know this. If anything happens to me, if I have chest pains or faint and don't wake up within a minute or two, just anything that requires medical help, and I can't, like, talk myself? This is my emergency card with all of the drugs that I am on and my doctors' names and numbers; give it to the paramedics or the treating doctors. I'm allergic to aspirin, so it's really critical that they see that, especially if I have a heart problem, okay?" I tugged out another card. "This has all of my emergency contacts. Doctors again, plus your mom and Logan. He's the most important since he has power of attorney, okay?"

My stepbrother was staring at me like I had punched him. He took the first card in his hand and stared at it. "But—why do you have all of this? You're not in treatment yet, right?"

"I want to live, Jeff," I said, looking at him until he met my eyes. "I have to be ready because something bad could happen at any time. I know you're only here for a week, but you could be the one with me if something happens. You have to help me live, understand?"

"Yeah," he said, his head rocking as he kept looking at that card, like it would do something. Tell him something. "What's power of attorney?"

"If I am unconscious or able to, like, communicate? Logan will make the decisions for my care. I trust him to do everything I need." I paused. "I trust your mom, too. Sharon has always been perfect when it comes to my treatments. But the problem is, Sharon didn't have power of attorney—Dad does. Did."

"That's why you got married so fucking quick," Jeff realized, leaning back in his chair. "You couldn't trust Richard."

I shrugged. "I know that Sharon would get him to do the right thing. But he…it takes her awhile to get through to him sometimes when it comes to me and my illness. I need someone who will act quick and not be paralyzed to do the right thing for me. I know Logan can do that. I mean, and there's the fact that a boyfriend won't be told everything that's going on with my treatment if I'm in an ER or whatever. A husband will."

"Richard's a dick," Jeff spat. "Really. I really can't stand your dad."

"He's _my_ dad, Jeff," I retorted. "Don't be mean to him."

"So, what, he beats you 'cause he loves you?" he rolled his eyes. "If my dad ever touched me like that, I woudda been like, Screw you, asshat." He shoved the emergency card back to me and stood up.

I titled my head at him. "Did you have a fight with your dad? Is that why you're here?"

"No, Mary Anne, I'm here to bond with my sisters," he smarmed, giving me a tight smile. I heard him force the air out of his nose before he turned and walked away. He stopped, though, in the middle of the living room. "Are you feeling better? I mean, after your freak out. You're better right?"

"Sure," I mumbled, grabbing another stack of journals. "Peachy."

Jeff's eyes dashed around in a sarcastic circle, but he kept walking away. I heard the thunder of his feet on the stairs, and then his voice blending with Dawn's, J.D.'s yips staccatoing over their words.

What was his deal? He hated me. He hated my father. He hated Stoneybrook. Was there anything that he liked? Other than his sister.

I wrote a note in my day planner: _Get to know Jeff before Sunday. _

Or die trying.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Wannapeddy?" Stacey slurred, a piece of bagel jamming her mouth.

"Is that a new market indicator?" I laughed, taking off my glasses and setting them on the bedside table.

Stacey held her hand in front of her mouth and chewed viciously. She swallowed. "Want. A. Pedi. As in, pedicure?"

"Sure," I smiled, hopping off the bed. J.D. trotted behind me, snapping at my toes. "Yes, those, puppy girl." I picked her up off of the floor and walked into Stacey's room where she was turning on lights, chasing away the night shadows. It had been slightly more organized since the last time I had stepped inside over the weekend; there were now clear paths to the bed, closet, and the desk set under the side windows where Dawn had spread out a binder full of news clippings next to her shut laptop.

Stacey flopped on the bed and patted the space in front of her. Dumping out a bag full of cotton balls, she glanced at J.D. "I suppose she can't play with these," Stacey said, narrowing her eyes.

"Um, no," I replied. I noticed a chew toy next to the bed and seized it, shaking it in front of her nose and then pitching it across the room. J.D. barked and pounced, rolling onto her stomach as she gnawed on the plastic squirrel.

"She is super cute," Stacey allowed, opening up her make-up case. "Pick a color."

My hand hesitated for a moment, but I plucked out a cherry red shade. Stacey nodded with a wicked curl of her mouth and pulled a magenta color for herself. Next to the cotton, she arranged several metal objects, a nail cutter, buffer, and polish remover.

"Professional," I noted, pointing at the line up.

"Is there any other way?" she snorted, bending up a tanned leg into a triangle and slapping my knee until I did the same with my right leg. "Dawnie and I do each other's feet, but, no offense, though I am certain that you have mastered basic make-up technique? I can't trust you to manage my cuticles. Watch closely, and next time, maybe you can be a technician, too."

"Nah, I kinda like being spoiled," I giggled. "All about me."

"Right?" she snickered. "Nice turn of the insult, May." She grabbed a metal probe that bore a vague resemblance to one of Logan's dental instruments and began shoving at the base of her nails. "So, what's up with you?"

"Nothing," I shrugged. "Yesterday, I just worked. Today, I just worked. Honestly, if Jeff wasn't skulking around every time I looked up from the table, I would swear it's just business as usual." I tapped my finger on her hand. "Have you overheard him and Dawn talking?"

Stacey shook her head, finishing up her last nail. She flipped the instrument around and began working on my own nails. The dull pressure of it against my skin made my skin ripple, but it didn't hurt. Not that a little hurt was a bad thing. I had a high pain tolerance ever since the first cancer; you can't have the feeling of a thousand hot coals rammed into your spine and then whine when someone pricks your cuticle.

She chewed on her lip. "At dinner last night, he said something about how he was so fed up, he'd prefer living in cold ass Connecticut with cold ass Richard—oh, come on, that's funny," Stacey insisted, looking at my scowl. "Has your father called you once during their vacation?"

"Sharon is still working on him," I said. I hoped.

"Right," Stacey drawled. "And the UN is still 'working' on Iran to behave itself. Anyway, then Jeff looked at me and shut the hell up. Dawn told him that he could trust me, but he only wants to talk to her."

"But Dawn tells you everything," I protested. "You must know."

"You asked me if I _overheard_ anything, not if I knew anything," she pointed out. "When Dawn tells me something, it's in confidence. If she chooses to tell you, that's fantastic. If not, well, I can't help that."

_She's lying to you!_ I wanted to scream, tossing everything off of the bed. _Tell me!_

Instead, I ducked my head. "Jeff hates me."

Stacey's eyebrows moved up a little, but she stayed quiet, taking the nail clippers to her own toes.

"Stacey?" I prompted. "This is where you say, Of course not, Mary Anne."

The brittle snap of nail made me wince. "Jeff doesn't hate you. But he doesn't like you," she admitted.

"Why? I want to make things better between us, how do I do that?" I pleaded, gripping her wrist.

Stacey snuck out of my hold, though. She snapped away in silence then turned to my own toes. "Why don't you try treating him less like Dawn and more like me and Logan? That is, you give the two of us plenty of space. I mean, hell, Lee went out last night without you, didn't he? I didn't hear you ask him a damn thing. But with Dawn and Jeff, you get whiny. It's like, you feel excluded all the time when it comes to them, and it shows that you're hurt. You're a terrible liar," she noted, tapping my ankle with the clippers.

I _used_ to be.

"I know, Dawn and I get really weird with each other, we all know this. Randa called me last night, and the first thing she said was, 'So, have you and Dawn had your first fight yet?' I mean, I accept you and Dawn being so close now, I do, but I always get skittish."

"She can't unsister you," Stacey told me. "And Jeff…just give him room. He just idolizes Logan. Use that as an in."

"He what?" I squeaked.

Stacey laughed. At me. "Oh, May. Jeff's a kick ass basketball player. He's totally not as good as the cracker, but he's pretty damn good. Didn't you know that?"

I shook my head. "Oh, crap," I moaned. "That's why he was so bummed and pissed when I asked him what sports he's playing. Nobody told me."

"Or maybe you didn't ask," Stacey challenged. "When was the last time you wanted Sharon to tell you more than just a simple, Jeff's doing fine? Which isn't the truth because she doesn't know the truth way across the country from him. She gets Jeff's story, and no story is ever told straight, is it?"

When Stacey moved the buffer over my nail, I shuddered at the scraping noise of it, the rough assault on a chalkboard sound. She moved the square in circles, hitting each angle of the nail and then blowing the dust away. On her own toes, though, she rubbed with a maniacal vigorousness, trying to whip the nails into submission. She slopped on a dollop of lotion and massaged the sweet sugar scent all over her foot. I held out my hand for some, my palm softening under the cold cream.

"How are you, Stacey?" I asked. I was tired of discussing why it was my fault everything was wrong. I had enough of that elsewhere.

Stacey took in a deep breath. "I am annoyed at Dawn," she announced.

I blinked. "No shit."

"Yeah, shit," Stacey snorted. "Listen, I do not begrudge her a boyfriend-type-whatever, you know? Good on her. But she's treating this guy like one of her old causes, you know? Just tossing herself into it. And it's like, are you kidding me? You have to spend every day with him? She said her goals this summer were to write. Second, to rest up because she had a horrible semester—hell, a horrible year—with her classes. I mean, the girl cannot focus on school—she'd rather go out and have fun and 'enjoy college.' Which means partying and overdoing it with clubs and activities. She is so smart, it's just lame how much she can slack off. Anyway, so, this summer was supposed to be writing, resting, hanging out with me since I was so busy last semester we barely saw each other—"

"What does that mean? Two full weekends a month?" I giggled, and the way she glared at me said I was right.

Stacey began shaking her nail polish. "We barely saw each other, so this was gonna be me and her time. And you and her time. And she promised that she'd really try to get to know your boy this summer—stop being such a bitch about him."

"You like him, right?" I asked in a soft voice.

She paused with the brush right above my big toe. "I like Logan—Davis encouraged me to give him a lot of shit? Cause he did? And Lee just takes it with a good sense of humor. Of course, under all of my shit, he knows that I genuinely like the guy. He was my love's best friend, and he did Dave a billion solids. You have to like someone who treats your man that good."

"Why did you end things with Davis?" I sighed.

My foot began to shine with the wet polish, a blood thing swimming on each toe. "Things are complicated in Staceyworld," she mumbled, finishing my left foot.

"You're not just…jealous of Dawn? For landing a summer fling?" I asked, leaning forward against my bent right leg.

Stacey laughed. "Oh, May, if I wanted a guy in this second? I could have seven. Dozen. But I don't. I don't," she repeated, a stunned look in her eyes. She moved across the rest of my toes and then turned back to my other foot. "Does your offer still stand? To talk to someone here? I talked to my mom, and she thinks it's a good idea, to not backslide."

"Sarah said she'd be happy to take you on—Dawn's seeing her suitemate, Harriet, since, well, we don't want to overlap. It weirded me out to be sharing Dr. Paves with Logan senior year even though his issues had nothing to do with me, and I couldn't take doing that again, especially with Dawn," I said, curling up my lips.

"How is Dr. Paves?" Stacey smiled.

"Good, I talk to her once a week," I gushed. "She's coming for her niece Yelena's wedding over Memorial Day, so I'll get to see her then. Yelena promised that we'll be at the same table." I hesitated. "Yelena invited us all over for dinner, but she cooks worse than the so-called chefs at SMS, so I've been trying to sneak out of it."

Laughing, Stacey pushed my feet out of the way so she could begin painting her own. "May, _that's_ a solid."

I bit my lip. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to promise not to freak. And then to help me talk to Dawn because she _totally_ will."

Stacey's head shot up. "What's wrong?"

I took a deep breath. "You guys can't smoke pot here and totally not outside. Logan saw you three out there last night, and I practically had to tazer him to stop him from bursting out there and causing a scene. You know him, he's so concerned with messing up—he can just envision some neighbor either calling the cops or at the very least, thinking that the point guard is some lazy stoner."

"He just wants to be left alone," Stacey said with a small smile. "How about if we smoke in that weird bomb shelter thing in the basement? We can close the door, use dryer sheets, burn some incense? No one will know."

"I'll ask," I shrugged. "But don't expect a yes on this one. This _is_ university property."

"Oh, that doesn't stop me in my dorm," Stacey giggled. "Can't you just—"

"No," I told her quietly. "I'll ask, but if he's not cool with it, that's it, Stace."

"Hey, I completely get it," she winked, capping her polish. "I'm a pretty quick gal, you know. And I'll get Dawn to behave. She always listens to me."

Because she was bending over, repacking her make-up case, she didn't see me blanch. Stacey sat back up and fluffed her hair. "So. Dawn's out on a Duncan sleepover, Jeff's downstairs watching some stupid movie, Logan's out on the town…why aren't we with him?" she wondered.

I wrinkled my mouth. "Barf. He's out dancing with Shawn and Sandy, the point guard from the women's team. My poor angel—his freshman year, he was voted 'Worst Dancer' on the team after Midnight Madness. Last year, he was second worst. So, he's been on this big kick to not humiliate himself again, so Sandy's been trying to show him how to shake his ass and not look like an epileptic."

"Oh, you mean, like how _you_ dance?" Stacey said with a howl of laughter. "Dude, I should tutor him. I _am_ a Dollie." She sucked on her lower lip. "I could give him the ol' Jessi Ramsey what for. She taught me how to dance, and I got super good."

Almost as good as Babs, I wanted to add, but I didn't. And from the look in Stacey's eyes, she knew. She knew.

"Maybe Jessi could help—an intervention," I giggled. "When she comes through with her summer tour—oh, oh, you asked for tickets for Erin and Jeremy, right? It's gonna be them, Randa and Emmy and me."

"Jessi said that the box office people think she's got a fan club down here," Stacey grinned. "Perfect, huh?" Stacey fanned her toes. "Let's go out! Let's go track down Lee and get our groove on, come on, May."

I let out a whine so high that J.D. jerked onto her feet. "I hate dancing, Stace!"

"Well, don't dance," she declared. "You can watch me and tell everyone how awesome I am." I laughed, watching her tear to her closet and contemplate a moment before jerking out a low cut black shirt and a pair of black pants. She tossed a wild pink scarf that billowed like a parachute on top of the outfit. I sat there petting my dog as Stacey whirled around the room, transforming herself from casual, relaxed Stacey into a sexy sylph, the color of the dark sky with that pink silk clinging to her hips. Her eyes became charcoal caves, those blueberry eyes of hers glinting like gems in their depths.

Flinging her hair back and forth a few times and spritzing the roots with hairspray, she stood in front of me with her hands on her hips. "Yeah?" she asked.

"Um, _yeah_," I laughed.

She winked again, grabbing my hand and pulling me into my room. "Let me call Erin and Jeremy, see if they want to come out."

As Stacey picked out a dress, as she put on my make-up—and I fought her on fake eyelashes—I contacted my friends and rallied them to meet at the dance club here in the town.

"You? Dancing?" Jeremy cackled. "It's so on."

"I hope not," I trembled. I texted Emily: _I'm going dancing_.

_I'll alert Homeland Security_, she messaged back.

"I'm glad I shaved my legs yesterday in the bath," I mumbled, staring at the bare expanse of flesh that the dress revealed.

"Hey, you've gotta work all of these cute, tight fitting dresses while you still have the belly for them," Stacey shrugged. "Besides, babe, you owned the dress in the first place."

I fiddled with a button on the green corduroy, then smoothed down the chest area; my catheter was still hidden, a secret snake against my skin. "Yeah, but I usually pair this with jeans, Stacey. You know, that look is back in."

"Oh, no it is _not_!" she yelped. "God, what else do you people believe in down here? Stirrup pants? Holy hell, there is no way I am coming to Duke." Stacey stuck her finger down her throat and shuddered twice. "Let's hit the shit, May."

I took a deep breath and followed her out the door, slipping on a pair of heeled sandals from Stacey's collection—three inches, enough to put my head on my husband's shoulder. I never knew Stacey and I had the same foot size. I didn't know a lot of things about her, actually. I followed her retreating form; Stacey wanted to hang out with me. She wanted to do something with _me_. Of course, Dawn was gone, but still. This was perfect. This was great.

Now I just had to make sure that I didn't say one word about Dr. Collins.

Jeff glanced at us from the living room/ "Where are you two going?"

"We're gonna go catch up with Logan, get out groove on," Stacey announced, pumping her fist into the air. "I'm gonna show these Southerners how we dance it in the S.F., bitch."

"I wanna come," he said, jumping to his feet.

I flinched. "You have to be at least eighteen," I told him.

Jeff reached into his back pocket and tugged out his wallet. He pulled out three laminated cards. "Okay, see this?" he said, coming up to us.

I peered at it. His driver's license that said he was seventeen.

"See these?" he continued, giving me another driver's license and a California state I.D. card, both saying he was two years older. I gaped at him.

"Fakes?" I exclaimed. "Jeff!"

"Everybody has them at home," he said with an exasperated sigh. "I have never once been busted. Not in L.A., not in New York. Me and the Pike triplets—who are from the Valley, according to their IDs—got in to places in the city like nuts the last time I visited Connecticut."

Stacey shrugged. "Let's work it, Jeff."

I glared at her, but Jeff gave her a high five and dashed into the office. "Pick out something," he ordered her, pointing at the explosion of clothes in his duffle bag. She fished out a black t-shirt, and Jeff motioned at us to turn around. Stacey took a step towards the wall blanketed in Logan's basketball photos; I had insisted that he put them up somewhere.

He said the basement. So I hung them here while he was taking his last final.

"This was last year's team?" Stacey asked, pointing at a framed poster. I nodded, scanning over the group of guys. They all looked so determined, menacing. I had to look away from the fury in my husband's eyes, instead staring at Keshawn, his face a hard thing but still playful. His game face was a joyous one; he would beat you, and he would have a damned fine time doing it. "Which one is Duncan?"

I pointed at one of the crouching players, both of his hands holding a ball against the court, his messy cap of hair nearly falling in his eyes. Stacey pursed her lips. "He's a bit on the pretty side, isn't he? I didn't think Dawn was into pretty boys."

I shrugged. Stay silent, don't say a thing. Stacey took in a deep inhale and tapped the poster of the women's team underneath it. "Which one is Sandy?"

"This one—the braids," I said. I made a face. "He went out on a date with her back when we were trying to see other people? And she's been totally dating a guy on the football team for a while, but it bugs me, and I can't help it."

"Aw, May, I think it's cute that you're a little jealous—I remember for a fact that Logan had a freak out about you hanging out with Jeremy so much? He called Davis in a panic mid-way through the season freshman year saying that he was scared he would lose you to your little psych buddy since he could barely spend any time with you, and you and Jerry were such a pair," she said, elbowing me in the side.

"And then Jeremy let me tell Logan that he was gay," I laughed. "Right. I know it's stupid, but I guess, in my head? I can't imagine any girl _not_ wanting my guy." I lowered my voice and leaned into her ear. "To be honest? It's totally such a turn on when, every time, he ignores all of the other girls and just pays attention to me."

Stacey clapped her hands. "You know? Discovering that you're a total closet nympho was no surprise to me," she giggled.

I gasped as Jeff roared with laughter behind me. I narrowed my eyes at the both of them. "You suck," I snapped.

"No, _you_ do," Jeff retorted. "I blow."

"Ew!" I screamed, covering my face. "You're my little brother, that's disgusting!"

"Oh, come on, Mary Anne," he said, pulling in the air over his tongue and making a snoring sound. "Don't be such a prude."

"'Cause you don't have the high ground here, for once," Stacey added, glancing at Jeff. "Come on, kids, let's hit the shit."

We walked into town, snaking past half-full restaurants and bars. But I knew that the club would be packed—it always was on Wednesday, Request Night. It was the only time where you could have Guns 'N' Roses, Wilco, Ludacris, and Johnny Cash backed up against each other. Musical democracy was a schizophrenic thing, it seemed.

Jeff made it past the bouncers with ease, smirking at me as we pushed the heavy black doors to the club open. "See?" he gloated as the sound hit us like a hand.

I rolled my eyes, walking to the railing and peering down at the packed dance floor. The crush of bodies was overwhelming, a press of undulating flesh that reminded me of a more primal version of a Duke basketball game. All of us students crammed together and moving, but here, the bodies were speaking to each other, all of the want that slicked on sweat and screamed at whomever touched that baking surface. It was so hot in here, crazed and cooking.

I wasn't shy Mary Anne anymore, but not even _May_ liked this. It was too obvious, too close to the edge. Too much liquor and noise and too happy to release control. I hated that feeling, of slipping away from myself. I didn't ever want to lose Mary Anne, not in the sake of having a good time. That wasn't a good to me. It was something dangerous and dark—though I could see it being exhilarating, a crushing rush of adrenaline. Maybe that's why so many people loved it.

Maybe that's why my sister loved it.

I waited at the railing as Stacey came back with two cups of fizzing liquid, limes floating like buoys. "Seltzer," she shouted in my ear. "Everyone thinks you're drinking a vodka tonic, and then you can act hideously stupid like all of the other drunks."

Beaming at her, we clinked cups. Jeff had wandered away from us, and I saw him bounding down from this upper level, from the bar and the smattering of tables, down to the dance floor. He broke into the mass of dancers and began flinging himself around to some screechy rock song, his arms a long length of elastic. I kept looking, spotting Keshawn clutching some stunning girl clad in a scrap of fabric that barely concealed her breasts. Near him was Sandy, pressed up against her boyfriend, a bulky creature with shale shelves for shoulders. When the song switched over to a cranking, pulsing rap beat, I saw her thrust her hands in the air. Another girl from the women's team moved in next to the boyfriend, and Sandy disappeared under the hang of the balcony, coming back a moment later with my husband, cajoling him into a fluid movement with her.

Good luck with that, I giggled, looking behind me for my friends. They arrived a minute later, Erin caked with make-up and Jeremy's shirt unbuttoned just a bit too low. Erin looked tipsy already, bumbling over her feet as she rushed to me.

"I had to predrink to come to Chapel Hill," she giggled, breathing a gust of bitter air, mean with alcohol.

"Shawn's here," I said, raising an eyebrow. Her face fluttered a bit, but she ran her hands over her hair and twisted up her mouth into a defiant thing before grabbing my wrist and charging the three of us down the stairs.

"Now, May, no moshing," Jeremy clucked. "The babies are good time Charlies, but I doubt they want to be groped by strangers. I mean, give it seven months."

I poked him as we reached the crowed floor. Jeremy took my hands and wove them with his own, coming close to me as he sang, "Come on, Eileen, oh, I swear, at this moment? You mean everything to me!"

I laughed, letting my hips swing in time with his own. He urged me to dervish in a circle, my uncoordinated limbs hurling around in a spiral. You could have a Mary Anne Dance Party in the middle of a crowded room and still have it be hidden, where everyone is too concerned with themselves to notice a crazy girl and her lack of rhythm.

A press on my behind made me jump, though, and I spun around, staring at some boy with a lecherous look in his beer sloppy eyes. "Get off my woman!" Jeremy screamed, holding up my left hand and planting a kiss on my cheek. "Jesus! I was right here!"

I rubbed his head. "You need to be more fierce," I laughed, tucking my hand with his. He sucked in his cheeks and pushed his head to the left. "No, Jerry, that's Blue Steel," I admonished, smacking his shoulder.

Erin pushed her way back to us. "Come on, they're at the back of the room—they got a big ass booth," she shouted.

"Of course they did, damned Tar Heels," Jeremy snorted into my ear. As we shuffled through the mass of bodies, Jeremy holding his body against my belly, I passed by my stepbrother worming himself with a pale girl with a heap of hair so dark that it glinted blue in the musky light. I raised my eyebrows at him, but his lidded face was tipped to the ceiling as he wound with her. I remembered the sounds of him and Haley Braddock from inside of his bedroom years ago, back when I was still virginal and a thing full of want. And my freshman family member was getting action with a girl I used to baby-sit.

It was hard enough then. Seeing it here in the shine of dull lights, it was still weird.

At least I wasn't jealous anymore.

We approached our friends, and I noticed more guys that I knew, receiving hugs that were too delicate to be ignorant of the babies. Keshawn, I realized, glaring at him. He noticed me and held up his hands. "Don't hate me! I thought the cat was out of the bag now," he whined, abandoning his dance partner. She gave me a cruel look before grabbing another boy on the team and fishing him into the crowd.

"The cat is still in the bag," I protested. "Hell, I want the cat in the bag until I give birth. Too much can still go wrong…and…Shawn, you didn't tell them that it's twins, right?"

He shook his face so fast that his cheeks flapped like rubber. "Nuh uh. I know that…that…yeah, that's top secret," he finished, crossing an X over his heart.

"Go dance with Erin," I ordered, and he raised an eyebrow at me. "She's drunk, she can't be her usual Stephen Hawking self when she's plastered, right?"

"That's what you think," he mumbled, but he turned away and reached for her hand. I saw her eyes flicker, an electric thing glowing from someplace deep as he began leading her body with his to the pounding of a Tom Jones song.

"Sex bomb, for sure," Jeremy said, thumbing at her. He looked around the crowd and sighed. "Can we go to a gay bar next time? I'm so shit outta luck here, it's not even funny."

"You can dance with Stacey—where is Stacey?" I asked, holding onto his shoulder to look around. I saw her pushing her way through the crowd, staring at Jeff with an amused expression as she reached us.

"Um, gross?" she laughed, sticking out her tongue.

"You let him come," I shot back, and she winced, pretending to choke. "Jer's feeling oppressed. He's a really good dancer."

She handed me her drink. "Let's go shag with our clothes on," she proposed, tugging on the collar of his shirt. He wiggled his eyebrows a few times with a large grin on his face as she tugged him into the heart of the dancing. I soon saw the flash of her hair splashing up to the ceiling as she slid into the song.

And I was alone, awkwardly tipping my body back and forth to the music. This is dumb, I sighed, scooting into the booth littered with purses and pieces of clothing. Coats, sweaters, a lone button sitting on the tabletop. Beers, half-finished drinks, empty shot glasses. I put down Stacey's cup, rimmed with the crimson line of her lipstick, and sipped at my seltzer. I could do this at home and not damage my eardrums. And I could be in my pajamas watching _Pride and Prejudice_.

A few minutes later, the music changed, a choppy electronic thing, and I saw a herd of familiar people coming back to the table. I chatted with a few of the other guys—well, screamed over the music while holding one of my ears shut to hear—and a waitress walked over to the table with a large tray full of small glasses with a milky looking liquid in them.

"Shots," she yelled, putting down the drinks and winking at the boys. "From the girls over there," she explained, pointing across the room.

Todd, a senior, handed her a rolled up bill. "Thanks, Denny," he yelled. He grinned at me. "Gotta love being a superstar, doncha?"

"I wouldn't know," I laughed. "I'm just a peon."

"Stick with me, kid, I'll take you right to the top. When it make it in the NBA, I'll even toss you a few bucks to fix that awful car of yours," he said, giving me a light punch on the shoulder.

I put my hand over my heart. "My car is crappy, but it's a perfectly fine piece of crap!" Besides, the last person to overhaul it had been my grandfather. When it wheezed, I could picture him taking out the oil-coated rag that he had slung over the worktable in the barn, using it to pry out parts and pieces before jamming them back into place, making the car purr.

I had so many dreams about my mother—I never thought about how, after so many years without her, my grandparents were able to be with her again. That they were waiting with her, too. Mom, them, Barbara, my friend Tim from the hospital at Yale—I had so many people on the other side. A family there. Even in the humidity of sweat and fog, I felt cold.

_Are you sure you want to get better?_

Stop it, Mary Anne.

An old Christina Aguilera song began, and Todd beckoned me onto the floor. "Come on, Mary Anne, let's get _dirty_," he begged, squatting low on his knees and then slowly curving back up to a stand. "Let's tell those kids of yours that Mommy loves to dance."

"You'll make me a liar, huh?" I giggled. "No, go find the girls who gave you the drinks. Christina wants you to get rowdy. I'm more like a mild ruckus."

He laughed, ruffling my hair before squeezing away. The other guys bled into the crowd, too, and I was alone again. But I noticed a bouncing body, braids flying like the snake arms of Medusa, a hand waving over that head. Sandy. And she was coming closer; she had her hand on Logan's shoulders, motoring him back to the table.

"Where's my man!" she was shrieking, giving him a hard shove. "I need a real man!" He leaned down over her shoulder and said something that made her gasp and slap his shoulder. His eyes rolled, catching a glimpse of me sitting at the table. When he saw me, biting his lip as I smiled, I couldn't help thinking that this second, this second of seeing him melt—this was worth coming tonight.

"What are you doing here!" he shouted, sliding in next to me.

I kissed him. "I came to check your progress. Frightened the women and children yet?"

"Always," he grinned, putting an arm around my waist and letting his fingers curl over my stomach. "Sandy says that I've moved past pathetic white boy dancing and into just clunky. That's good news."

"We have so much work to do before October, it's insane," she sighed, accepting two shot glasses from her boyfriend. She clinked both together with him and poured each down her throat, her face contorting slightly as she gulped. "I'll let him go for a bit, but the next rap song, he's mine, understand?"

I nodded, waving her away. I took a deep breath. "Do you want to dance?"

"You?" he asked, looking at me from the corner of his eye. "Are you drunk?"

"Oh, sure, I've been doing tequila shots since five. The babies are singing Mexican drinking songs. Lushes," I snorted.

He laughed, kissing my shoulder. "If you want to. Remember. I'm a scary thing in motion."

"Don't I know it," I teased, pressing his hands to my belly, and he grabbed my face and pulled it to his, pushing his tongue past my slack lips. This wasn't my thing, this wasn't our thing, being public and showing off, but maybe it was the pulse of the sound or just the feel of his damp skin on mine. Or the fact that in a few weeks, I'd be showing, and coming to a club would be a dirty thing. But I wrapped my hands against the back of his head, tying him to me, pulling my leg over his, urging his hand to touch that bare river of skin.

"Pregnancy has been very, very good to me," he grinned into my neck.

"I know," I murmured, biting on his ear.

He pulled back an inch. "I just really want to go home now."

"No, we're going to go dance at least once, and then you're gonna let Sandy have one more turn—oh, Stacey volunteered to help you in your quest to not be the crappiest dancer in North Carolina," I said, tucking my fingers under the hem of his shirt and pressing against his stomach.

"Great," he muttered, helping me out of the booth. I screamed as the song changed to a band that _I_ actually liked.

"The Flaming Lips, yes, yes! Finally, something good," I gushed, yanking him deep into the mound of bodies.

_Good?_ he mouthed, narrowing his eyes. I bounced around in a circle to the repeat of the _yeah yeah yeahs_ in the song, wagging my fingers in time with them. Holding me like we were waltzing, Logan tipped me back and forth, even sending me in a spin a few times. I began to grow bold as I laughed, giggling and twirling and even trying to move my body like Stacey's, as though I was a ropey thing that could bend and slide and be sexy. As I took a step back and bobbed in time with the repeated words, Logan covered his face and laughed at me, reaching forward and taking my hip to dance me in a circle.

"This isn't bad," I called out, slowing down as the background instruments faded away for a moment.

"Well, one bad dancer plus one bad dancer, I think, equals one good dancer," he shrugged. The music started up again, and I started to jump, urging him with me. I tossed back my head and shook my head in a stupid jerking, my eyes closing as I grew faster. And when the song bled into another, and then another, I kept dancing with him, sloppy and ridiculous and silly.

"It's the theme from _Footloose_," I realized, clapping my hands. "Can you do the Kevin Bacon dance?"

"What, the thing where you kick and flail your arms?" he asked. "If you want to do that, pretty girl, you should make sure that your shoes are firmly _on_ your feet, if you know what I'm saying."

I gasped, reaching out to pinch him, when Erin ran over and put her arms around me. "It's the Kevin Bacon dancing song!" she screamed. "Shawn and I are gonna do it. Come on, May, let's get footloose!"

"I can't—I'm paranoid now," I pouted, looking at my heels. I leaned my head on Logan's shoulder and nearly buckled under the weight of my laughter as she and Keshawn flung their arms back and forth while hurling their legs in the air. It seemed like everyone was doing that dance; I even stepped back so that Keshawn and Sandy could lure my husband into their circle. All of their long legs jutting up and then slamming back down like odd pistons. I clutched my sides and screamed in hysterics as Erin overkicked and fell to the ground, Keshawn tripping over her and felling himself like a tree.

"Footloose, not foot ignorant," I shouted as they gingerly stood back up.

"Yeah, bite me—you dance like you're getting electrocuted," Keshawn spat, slumping his arm over Erin's shoulder. "Let's go back there and redeem ourselves."

Erin glanced at me and tightened her mouth, bugging out her eyes. I widened my own eyes at her and wriggled my nose at her, urging her to go. Go! She grinned and let herself be led out into the center of the room, brushing up against my sister's best friend spinning around my own favorite guy at my university.

Sandy put her hand on my shoulder. "Dude, he's dancing great with you. You need to come out more," she nodded.

"Um, no," I laughed. "You're doing a real community service, Sandra."

"I know," she grinned. She pointed up at the strobing lights. "Oh, bitchin', it's Norry, Norry."

"What's a Norry?" I asked.

"N.O.R.E.—Jesus, you are too white to function sometimes," she sighed. "He's from _el barrio_, he's the man! It's The Neptunes, May."

"I know them," I gasped. "Okay, I'll try it. I'm not very good at dancing with rap, though."

She wrenched up her face in thought. "It's like fast sex but standing up. And with clothes on. Raise your hands up in time with the music, okay? And, um. Just think of your hips being in a hula hoop that's moving very, very slowly. And then, back up into your chosen guy." She grabbed her boyfriend's hand. "I choose you," she added, winking at him. She shot me a thumbs up and turned away, slinking down on her knees.

And I was jealous of her? She had been nothing other than nice, sweet, and fun. And not chasing after my guy. I had to get a grip. Maybe Dawn was right—I did overreact a lot, didn't I.

I wasn't perfect, not at all. I sighed, though I smiled as a hand snuck over my waist. "I want to dance to this song—Norry, Norry," I repeated.

"Who?" Logan frowned.

"You are so white," I rolled my eyes, and he tipped his head back and laughed as I pushed him, keeping that arm against me as I rocked from foot to foot with the beat.

Tarik raced by and grabbed Logan by the shoulders. "This is so our song this year," he slurred. "See? It's about being a pimp and being totally awesome? Yeah? And bouncing—like a basketball! Doncha think? It's perfect, it's a sign—it's a sign!" he crowed, running away towards Todd.

"Freshmen," Logan grunted. "They are so energetic and stupid."

"Oh, and you're so wise," I teased, rubbing his arms.

He kissed my cheek. "I so am—okay, wait. Does it seem like this song has a lot of way too fast rapping, but mostly, it's just two words? And they're instructional, just in case you're a thick ass freshman," he said into my ear. "They want us to bounce, bounce."

"I'd rather not—more like, raise up in my toes and then back down again," I smiled, lifting my arm like Sandy said, pumping it a bit and then sliding it around his head behind me. I circled my hips against his, and I felt him jump a bit, press harder to me, and lure my body in a curve with him. I felt my breath thicken and quicken and take on a low noise. His fingers bent around my pelvic bone, and I let a hand slide to his thigh, urging him closer, closer. Maybe dancing wasn't all that bad. Not when it could make me feel like this, heavy and hot and red.

I pulled his head closer. "Let's go home."

"That's what I'm saying," he murmured, still holding me to him. "We're only two weeks removed from the wedding, Mary Anne. A lot of couples wouldn't have left their beds yet."

"You are so bad," I whispered. "I love it." I bit my lip and told him, "Stacey says I'm a closet nympho."

"She's wrong—our closets are too small," he dismissed, leaning down and licking a small line on my neck. "Wanna get outta here?"

"Let's adios this fiesta," I nodded. "Let's not even say goodbye. I don't want to disrupt Erin and Shawn. They might be cool enough to figure out that they are stupid for each other, right?"

"It's Request Night, not Miracle Night," he warned, patting the back of his pants for his wallet. "I'm good."

We snuck through the crowd, pausing to say goodbye to Stacey. She was a breathless, sweaty ball, her hair matting against her forehead. "God, Jerry's great," she exclaimed, putting an arm around him.

"I know," he shrugged. "I can't help being awesome."

"See you tomorrow," I told him. "Take care of Erry."

Before I could even speak, Staeey held up her hand. "I got Jeff. You two go home. I can't believe you danced," she beamed, reaching forward to give me a hug. "We should do this every week until you start to show, totally."

And I surprised myself when I said, "Yeah, we should." She winked at me and then screamed when a Madonna song swung over the crowd. She grabbed Jeremy's hands, and they began dancing again, waving us away. I tried looking for Jeff, but I couldn't find him anywhere. Oh, well, Stacey said he could come, Stacey would get him home.

Like he'd want me to take him anyway.

Or anywhere.

I tucked my hand in the waistband of Logan's pants, letting him clear a path through the dancing and up the stairs. I watched people leap out of the way, and I could only imagine the glare he was giving. When we slipped through the side exit, the cool night air swallowed my sweaty body, and I gasped in relief, fanning my face and wrists.

"I walked, so unless you drove?" he began, and I shook my head, so we started walking home. He slowed, though, letting me get a few steps ahead of him. "Those shoes, holy damn," he whistled. "Stacey?"

"Yup," I grinned. "What, are they good?"

"They make your legs look, like, a mile long," he breathed, and I twisted the sole of my left foot in the ground and spun around. He rushed up and put his arms around my waist, picking me off of the ground and curling a ribbon of kisses around my mouth.

"You think I'm sexy, huh?" I teased, pressing a finger on his lips.

"Just a little," he grinned. "Maybe a tad."

I slid back down to the ground and shrugged. "Well, that's good. I was thinking that you were a smidge above 'not bad' myself. Not a bit, but a smidge." He held his fingers and inch apart, and I gave him a curt nod. "That's within the margin of error, of course."

"What can I do to increase that percentage, Dr. Spier?" he asked with an innocent blink.

"I can walk you through it once we get home," I assured him. I took his hand and turned the ring around his finger. "I can't believe I'm married. I'm so freakin' lucky, do you know that?" His mouth opened, and I could see the joke on his tongue, so I stopped walking and put my hand over it. "Logan, I'm serious. I'm not a very good person, and you don't seem to notice that."

My hand radiated with pain as he clutched hard on my fingers. "What do you mean, you're not a very good person?" he snapped. "Where did that come from?"

I shrugged. "I just…I'm not. I'm bitchy and selfish, I am—I didn't even know that Jeff was a good basketball player, which, you totally have to hang out with him."

"If he's nicer to you," Logan said, narrowing his eyes. "I'm not gonna spend time with someone who openly hates you, pretty girl. And, okay, so you're selfish. Like I'm not? Nobody's perfect, right, but you're not saying that you are. Christ, Mary Anne, you are usually so confident about yourself, what brought this on? Is it Jeff? I swear, I'll have him on the next friggin' train to Stoneybrook," he declared, hardening his eyes.

"No," I sighed. "I don't know where this is coming from. I just feel like I'm swinging lower at times. I'm getting snappish and stuff—and I totally had a 'Why would Logan want me if he's got someone like Sandy around' moment, too. It's like I keep stepping into tar."

"Your meds," Logan realized, slapping his forehead. "This is probably part of the withdrawal. Okay, so, you probably should see Sarah twice a week now."

"Yeah," I nodded. "Yeah. I don't want…tonight was so much fun, you know? I don't want to start living my life where I'm bouncing between good moments and bad. Between the babies and how they're throwing my system out of whack and now the meds…I'm really scared," I whispered.

He stood there, rubbing his fingers over my knuckles. "I'm here," he promised.

"Want to be my chariot?" I suggested, ducking my shoulders. He smiled, swooping me up into his arms and kissing my forehead. "These shoes are sexy, but they're killer."

"What an excuse," he groaned. "You just want to be spoiled."

"Well, what can I do to spoil you—other than when we get home," I giggled. "Tell me how to be good to you."

Logan squinted, rolling his eyes back and forth. "Hmm. How about you take pity on me and do the laundry? I know, I know, I lost the grades bet, but I'd love a free pass, just once?"

"I can manage," I sighed. "I suppose." I kissed his cheek and added, "And you're not selfish. Tarik said that you're playing like your precious Kirk Hinrich—completely unselfish about sharing the ball."

"Really?" he beamed. "Well, come on, the other four starters are incredible! You think I'm gonna take a shot when they are, like, the good ones? I mean, Mary Anne, I totally feel like the 'which one of these things doesn't belong' when I play with them. I just hope they remember me when they're all huge stars, like, send me a postcard and let me fix their teeth and stuff." He shook his head and sighed. "I really need to teach that Croatian the value of flossing, for real."

"You could play pro, at least in Italy," I pressed. "I told you, I'm okay with that."

I felt him shrug. "Nah, I'm not gonna sit on the bench in Napoli when I could be starting my life, you know? And I'm not that good—I have a great college game, do you understand the dif—of course you don't," he grinned. "It's like, I can get away with playing how I play here. I've known since I was fourteen that my style would work with Coach, right? They molded me at Oak Hill to be _this_ kind of player, nothing more. In the pros, they don't really play a traditional point guard—like, all I do really is set the pace and pass the ball out. I'd have to be about a zillion plus five times better than I am with scoring and versatility and shit at that level. I'm so tired, I hurt all the time, I am looking forward to being done. I just want to be a dentist, be your husband, be a dad."

"You're gonna be a great dad," I smiled.

"I hope," he said, tightening his face in worry. "I'm still concerned about breaking the baby." He turned onto the walkway to the house and set me on the ground. He let his fingers slide on my waist while I fished the keys out of my pocket. I had trouble getting the key into the lock as he kissed my neck, crunching the metal of it against the door. Once we got inside, I pulled his shirt over his head, and his fingers began fumbling with the buttons on my dress. There was an urgency billowing around us, a need, a thing with a quick pulse and a hot-laced tongue. He pushed my dress down there in foyer; I left his pants midway up the stairs, my panties two steps above them.

But the shoes stayed on.

I slammed his body against our door, ringing kisses over his stomach as I took off his boxers. The doorknob turned with a mean creak as his hand moved it, and when the door yielded, we tumbled backwards.

And there was a scream. So I screamed. Logan fumbled for the light switch, flooding the room in a sharp yellow light. It hit our bodies, jaundiced in the harsh brightness. And it hit the bodies of Dawn and Dr. Collins, pressed together on our bed.


	9. Chapter 8

Logan snapped the lights back off and ran into the bathroom. But I stayed there in the dark for a moment longer, my mouth crayoned into an empty scream.

"Oh, my God!" Dawn shouted. "You weren't supposed to be home! You only left an hour ago. Mary Anne!"

No words came. Just air passing over my limp tongue. Just shallow breaths. I turned and dashed into the bathroom, too, slamming the door and locking it. I pulled on my robe and slumped to the floor. Did she see? Did she see my scars?

I heard a dull clunking noise from inside the shower, the pattern of Logan banging his head back against the wall. "Kill me, kill me," he muttered, covering his face with his hands. Sitting there in the tub with his boxers on inside out, he looked so humiliated, I wanted to cry. I crawled over to him, pushing back the shower curtain, and climbed into the tub. He rubbed his face against the fleecing of my robe. "I think I should go down to the laundry room and drink the whole gallon of bleach. Maybe that will make me clean again."

"Oh, angel, I'm so sorry," I whispered, tightening my arms around his neck.

"Why are you sorry?" he said, slamming hard on the _you_. "You weren't making out with some guy on my bed. Were they clothed at least? I didn't notice."

"They were," I sighed. "And I'm sorry because she's my sister, and she's here because of me. This is my fault."

He grabbed my chin. "Stop that," he snapped. "It's not on you. Who the hell is that guy?"

I took a deep breath, measuring it against the sound of feet tromping down the stairs, the click of the front door. "Stacey's econ professor. He and Dawn have been hooking up." His eyes popped open, pupils dilating, and I grabbed his hand, his left hand, meeting his rings with mine. "Logan, I have to tell you something that's going to make you upset with me."

"Do you really think this is the time for it?" he questioned, narrowing his eyes.

I nodded, opening my mouth again when Dawn called out, "He's gone. Can I talk to you guys?"

"No," Logan shouted. "Just leave me alone. Holy shit, Dawn, our _bed_? Stacey's prof? Are you insane?"

The doorknob jerked, resisting her hand. I heard Dawn walk away, so I turned back to my husband, running my fingers over his neck, splotched with a flush of shame. Around his tight mouth was a ring of white from the pressure of those flinching muscles—he looked miserable. How could this not be my fault? If we had just gone home when he had suggested, forty minutes ago, this never would have happened. If I hadn't insisted to Dawn and Stacey that they stay with us, in our house, this never would have happened. I did this. I did this.

"Mary Anne Spier, I swear to God, I will never kiss you again if you keep saying that this is your fault," Logan declared, now putting both hands on my face. Had I been talking out loud? "I can't take it. This sucks, I'm totally embarrassed, but it's not like I was shot, right?" He stretched his arms above his head. "My shoulder's not ripped to shreds, right? It's not like I've got cancer," he added, resting his hands on my head. "I'm gonna kill your sister, but I refuse to let you feel anything about this. _Tesorina_, you can spiral down so fast into a depression, okay, we can't go there. Stay positive, understand?"

"Okay," I mumbled. Be positive, be positive…

There was a violent scraping noise, and then the door popped open, a hand shoving it so hard that it hit the wall. "Don't hide from me," Dawn said, setting a screwdriver next to the sink. She put her hands on her face. "I am so sorry, guys. Really. Stacey said she would text me when you guys were leaving…I just…our room is so messy, and I just couldn't take the idea of hooking up with him on Stacey's bed, so…we came here for me to pick up this book I'm lending him? On activism—cause he wanted—"

"Dawn, I don't care," Logan interrupted. "I honestly don't care. Come on, how shitty were you? Who cares why."

"Were you trying to seduce him? Luring him upstairs and all?" I asked, looking at her from the roof of my eyes.

Leaning against the door, Dawn nodded. "He just wants to talk. He says I'm fascinating. And I'm like, get with the program, dude, if your idea of a torrid summer romance is hours of talking, then we gotta stage in intervention."

"Can we focus here?" Logan said, pressing his fingers on the rim of the tub. "Dawn. Seriously."

"What, like you've never screwed up before?" she snapped. "Hello? You and May in eighth grade, you and Randa the whole time, you and the state playoffs senior year—fouling out, that was a real ace move," she said, holding out a thumbs up. "You mess up all the time, you just have Mary Anne to tell you that you're so good, that you're an angel. Or you hide, that's your style, nobody notice the guy behind the ball player." She waved her hands in front of her body and then let them fall to her side. "Don't play all high and mighty. I messed up huge, I'm sorry, what more do you want from me?"

"Stacey's prof?" he pressed. "Are you kidding? Does she know?"

"No, and you're not telling, either," she demanded. "May said that you won't tell. The story is, I'm hooking up with Duncan Morris. Got me?"

"Oh, hell no," he snorted. "I am not getting caught up in this. If Stacey asks me, I am not covering your ass, not at all. I hate lying."

Dawn narrowed her eyes at him. "You look pretty comfy with a liar on your lap, though, Lee. Ask Mary Anne—she knew about this. She's known for a week."

His jaw tightened as he glanced at me. "Yeah, well, Mary Anne's got a weird sense of loyalty to you. I don't get why, but whatever."

"Like she's not all up in your shit all the time," Dawn shot back. "You've been leaning on her like a crutch since high school, and I'm tired of it. Do you have any real friends? And don't say your teammates, they're with you because they have to be. You're still the lonely guy from SHS who handled May's cancer so well because you had nothing else in your life."

"Dawn!" I shouted. "Stop it, both of you, stop it!"

"Oh, what, you gonna protect him again? Yeah, well, if you think the only reason why May kept that secret is because she's got some twisted sister thing going on? Ask her about the bleeding," she hissed, bending forward at the waist. "Go on, ask her. Ask her why we were really gone for nearly an hour and a half from the party last weekend."

"Bleeding?" he said, speaking on the inhale, his words thinning out over the air. "Mary Anne?"

I pulled my arms away from him, looking down, looking anywhere but those blue eyes.

"I'm sorry," Dawn inserted. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm the fuck up. May's Miss Perfect, right, and I'm the fuck up. Well, hey there, husband, your little princess is just as bad as me. We're sisters, right down to the lies we tell. Explain to me how you'll avoid me for the next week, but you'll go right on ahead and forgive her, huh? Because Mary Anne is so perfect, she's just perfect, and I'm the one who needs to _focus_. Well, at least I'm not the one who's fucking pregnant at nineteen," she shouted, slamming the door behind her. I hear her bound down the stairs, banging the front door in punctuation.

I heard him swallow. "Bleeding?" he said again.

"Don't hate me," I breathed, watching his hands. One was still on the side of the tub; the other was on his head, moving over his scalp. Over and over.

Logan looked up and pulled his hand down. "Mary Anne?" That hand moved to my face, and I winced, my eyes balling shut. I was waiting for the red smack against my cheek. Tell me that I'm bad. Show me. "Mary Anne," he said again, firmer, insisting. I edged my eyes open, and I saw him staring at me in misery. "Oh, pretty girl, I'm not going to hurt you. I'm not your dad." His hand touched my face, soft as wings.

"I deserve it. I deserved it then, I deserve it now. She's right. I'm just as screwed up as her. And I'm worse because she's so open about being a work in progress, and I keep acting like I'm—I'm perfect," I said, slumping those words out. I choked over the lump of bitter tears that was climbing up my throat, rushing everything out. "And I'm not. I lied to you, I did—I wanted to protect you. This is so not fair to you, the babies, and your parents were coming, and I didn't want you to worry when the doctors said it was nothing—we went to the ER, and they said it was nothing, so I didn't want you to worry."

I huddled up, weaving my head between my legs. "Yell at me, please, yell at me."

Logan squirmed under me, shifting me off of his body so he could stand. He left the bathroom, and I heard him rooting around in our bedroom; when he came back to me, shutting the door again, he had a pad of paper and a pen in his hand. He sat on the ledge of the tub and propped the pad on his knee.

"Okay. You need to talk to Sarah about your dad slapping you," he said, writing down the number one and _Richard hitting Mary Anne_. "And this idea of you needing to be punished for stuff that you have no control over. Second, you are going to really, really talk out how bad things might get off your meds. You're already beginning to swing down, but I can't tell if this is how it's gonna be or if this is just withdrawal stuff. Maybe this and the punishment deal are born from the same place. And third, you and me are going to go in together because we need to talk this shit out."

"What?" I asked, peeking up at him.

"You do not need to 'protect' me," he stated, slapping the pad against his thigh. The popping noise made me pull back. "I am working really hard on not smothering or hovering or whatever, right? And you've got to give me the same respect, Mary Anne, or else this is gonna be one long string of months. I know what I can handle, understand? I'll tell you if I need time with things, if I need time to think stuff over. That's me, pretty girl. That's me. I can take everything if you just give me the time to deal with it afterwards."

"I bled," I murmured. "I touched my thighs, and there was blood there. I drove to the ER with Dawn, they said that it was just a normal complication that some women have. If it continued, then it was a big deal. But I didn't bleed again, and we were so solid after your parents, I just kind of put it out of my mind, and then I couldn't figure out how to tell you."

"Just like this would have been fine," he sighed. He pressed his fingers against his eyes, taking in air through his nose. "Oh, Mary Anne. You have to trust me. You don't get it—my worst nightmare is that something happens to you, and I'm the last to know. That you or the doctors or whatever can't find me, and by the time I get there, it's too late. I have given you my schedule to the minute, and if I can't get a hold of you? I don't change my plans. Because I wake up in the middle of the night from dreams where you're dead, and I'm off screwing around without knowing. I will never be able to live with myself if that happens."

"I'm scared that you'll kill yourself if I die," I admitted, grabbing his leg.

His hands fell down.

And he didn't say anything. He didn't even breathe.

"If there's a baby, I would never leave it alone," he finally said. "It's you, Mary Anne. I could never do that to you."

"I know," I said, curling my arms all the way around his leg and resting my head on his thigh, my cheek brushing over the soft hair that crept up from his skin. His body bent down over mine, and I felt the press of lips on my spine. He didn't say he wouldn't, he didn't tell me that I was being ridiculous, that I was overreacting.

"I won't tell Stacey," he whispered. "Not if you don't want me to."

"I don't want you to," I replied.

"I need to just be quiet for a while, is that okay?" he asked. I nodded, and he reached back to the light and flicked it off, plunging us into darkness. I stood up, feeling his legs poke down around mine as he spread out in the dry tub. I laid my body on his, untying my robe and letting it billow over us like a meadow. Green like spring grass.

"For the record? That was one, Mary Anne. Everybody fucks up—we all get so many. But, I'm willing to Clean Slate it for you up until a point."

"How many do I get?" I sunk my hand against his face, running a thumb along his jaw.

I felt it tighten under my thumb. "Hmm. A million. Give or take. So you better watch it—you're getting up there."

"I'll have to be more careful," I agreed. My thumb kept stroking him until I felt the line of his face soften, relax. "I'll never keep anything from you, I promise."

His head tipped against mine, and I felt him nod, but he stayed quiet, a silence as heavy as the night. We were there so long that my head began to fuzz over in sleep when he cleared his throat.

"You wanna spend the night with me?" he asked.

I blinked, trying to find his features in the dark. "Wasn't I going to?"

"I'm gonna go sleep out on the hammock. It's such a nice night, so clear, we can see all of the stars. Come with me?" he offered.

I curled off of him and stepped out of the tub. "Yeah," I said. "That sounds nice."

We stopped in the bedroom for clothes, and he grabbed the fleece blanket that I had tossed to the ground when I left with Stacey. "I assume this is un-Dawned," he grimaced, wrapping it over his arms. J.D. followed us out the back door, leaping onto the hammock and then back down again as he climbed onto it.

I watched the dog curl up in sleep next to us on the grass as I settled my body on his. There was a light breeze tickling the trees, making the leaves shuttle back and forth. There was a rustle of birds moving from the roof to the maple, a shush of cars driving by on the main road a few blocks away. Around us, lightning bugs exploded into seconds of flame before dying into darkness, then flaming bright again. When I tipped my head to the sky, I could see the red blink of airplanes slicing overhead, moving past us, moving forward to their destinations.

"How many stars do you think there are?" I asked, resting my head over his heart. That beat was slowing, gentling down under the press of me. For every ten beats, he would draw his hand down over my back and then lift it back up. Ten seconds of him over me.

"Not enough," he said. "Not as many as there are on you." He ran his hand along the line of my necklace, and I smiled.

I heard his mouth open and then close. He coughed, and I looked at his mouth, almost expecting blood to be there. Like I had once found a few weeks ago. "If I tell you something, will you promise to not hide things from me? Will you just trust that I am the one guy that's never gonna run on you?"

I propped my elbows on his chest. "What is it?"

"I know it, well—how I went away and changed? It wasn't just Davis beating on me, all of the guys on that team beating on me, just pounding out all of my, like, bossiness out of me. The only place to be bossy was on the court, right, everywhere else, Logan shut up," he said with a shrug. "But it was more than there. They'd hit you, Mary Anne. You'd get your ass whipped for detention."

"Like—corporal punishment?" I blinked.

He nodded his head in a slow ribbon. "Yup. Boys could choose manual labor stuff or you could get smacked. And someone told me that to accept my sins and suffer physically like Christ would help me cleanse my poor, misguided soul."

"Your old girlfriend," I supplied. "Bitch."

"No, no, she…I mean, she was right. I shook that off real quick—I became so nervous about screwing up that I just kept my head low and did the best I could. But I was hit, I don't know, seven times my freshman year? And then just once sophomore year—that was for the phone throwing incident," he winced. Logan let out a long breath. "Mary Anne, I know how it can change you, when you're hit. And it's different, because I chose it at least. But, yeah. And that's the scar on the back of my leg. The paddle snapped there—I had, I don't know, dozens of splinters lodged in my skin. They had to take me to the hospital an hour away, it was just nuts. That was the last time I got into trouble."

"What had you done?" I asked, creeping up his body so I was an inch from his face.

He closed his eyes. "I was late to math. I was in the gym, I didn't want to stop practicing until I had made a hundred shots. I got to geometry one minute late. And that was enough." When his eyes opened, they were so flat I could see myself in them, the droop of my makeup on my face. I brushed the eyeliner off of my skin as he added, "So that's why I worry so much about being late for you. Because a single minute can be everything."

"They hurt you," I whimpered, kissing his cheek. "I hurt you, too, though."

"No you don't—there are different kinds of pain, pretty girl, and when I hurt because you're suffering, that's a kind of pain that's just life, right? Love means sacrifice, my dad told me that, and loving someone isn't all peaches and bluegrass. But you can burn right over with wrongness, you can be flayed for being so proud that it has to be ripped out of your own body. I will never be that guy who thinks he's got all of the answers because it was slapped right out of me. Dawn's right—I'm preoccupied with being good because good people don't get punished like that. I'll adapt, I'll change, I'll swallow shit down and find a way to deal, just as long as I get to the end of the day without having someone batter me with how bad I am. Nothing is as bad as that," he stated, murmuring his head back and forth.

When I kissed him, I realized how close he was to crying, the smell of salt hitting my nose in a white bitter way. We squirmed until he was on top of me, my hands trailing down his body and finding that odd maze of spattered scars at the top of the back of his thigh. I hadn't discovered them until right before senior year, the first time we were naked in the light, as he stood up in a sunlit room and stretched up his body like a tree. Not like the place where his sister cut him, not like the lines on his chest. A secret dotting of pink sheer skin, the shape of shame.

I thought it was a birthmark. Had he lied to me? No. I never asked.

I just accepted that fact that one Logan had left and another had come back. That he had molded himself against the round rise of a basketball, that he had been broken down over his mother. No, no, he had come back broken and rebuilt himself in the shadow of his mother's illness.

And then in mine.

I slid my legs apart, and he took off the boxers on his body, the pair that I was wearing, too, tossing them down on the ground next to our dog. "I'm so sorry," I said, dragging my teeth over my lips as he pushed into me. "I'm so sorry. About that, about not telling you. You never have to prove that you're good. I know you are."

"That's why I love you," he said, putting his hands under my thighs. My unscarred thighs. I touched my chest—we matched, we did. All of things that had been taken away from us. And look what we got in return. Look what we have now.

Eyes hooded, he kept saying that over and over, pulsing it with the way he was rocking with me. _I love you, I love you_. My hands urged him down, those persistent lips coming so close to my ear as he leaned onto his hands. _I love you, I love you_. He had said that so many times on our last night together back in March, rolling across the thicket of blankets in our hotel. It was just like this that night. He would leave me for a week, where I could only watch him on television for a second before snapping it off. I hated watching him play, I hated seeing the anger that bled up his veins and lodged in his quick eyes. But I loved the man, who had me in his arms telling me that he loved me the night that babies began then, telling me that he loved me the night that babies began.

It had been that night, I knew it.

_I love you, I love you_. It was like the roll of surf on sand, washing me clean. His arms roped behind my back and pulled me into his lap, and I kept pushing against him, kissing that moving mouth; it never stopped telling me. I pressed my fingers there and told him, "You're my angel, my husband. It'll be in health one day, I promise."

"No dying," he said.

"No dying," I told him, and I gasped, pressing my lips against his so I wouldn't cry out as a chill rode up my body, surrendering into a blaze that numbed my whole body over and left my bones elastic in its wake. He stuttered a low noise into my mouth as he stiffened and then went slack, letting us tumble back down onto the canvas stretch of the hammock. I panted, wiping the sweat off of my forehead and neck as he lolled his tongue out of his mouth.

"Newlywedness rocks," he grinned, tickling my waist.

I grabbed his hand and bit down on the tip of his index finger. "Just wait until the baby comes."

He frowned and scooted down under the blanket. I lifted it up and watched him tap my stomach. "Hey, listen up. I really dig hooking up with your mom, so you better respect that, understand?"

"Oh, I'm sure that's how it works," I laughed. "Why don't you tell them—" I froze. "I keep changing between thinking of them as two then to just one. I can't believe I'll have to let one go."

"Don't think about it—let's just see how it goes, okay?" he said, kissing my belly.

But I could still hear Stacey, those words she had said while sitting here, saying that one of them wouldn't be right. How his parents swung here and showed us the picture of that baby, so ill it couldn't live. This wasn't the place to be optimistic.

This was a place where being right was never a promise. It could slip through fingers with the quickness of rushing blood.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I tapped my knuckles on the closed door. "Dawn?" I called in a soft voice.

"On-tray," she called. I snuck the door open and stepped into the room. I startled at the cleanliness of it; all of the clothes had been put back in the dresser or the hamper, the bed was a crisp, smooth thing with pillows punched into fluffy blocks. Dawn was typing on her computer, but she turned around to face me as I walked to the bed and sat down on the corner.

"Hi," I said, looking at my hands. "Sharon called. She said she'd be here by six for dinner."

"Do you need any help?" Dawn asked, crossing her arms over her chest. "I don't want Mom to think that you have to do everything around here."

"No. Jeff set the table, and I have dinner all done," I told her. I twisted my engagement ring around my finger and sighed. "We haven't talked once since Wednesday night."

"Well, then, TGIF," Dawn said with a roll of her eyes. She thumbed back at her computer. "Is there anything else? I mean, I want to finish this scene before Mom gets here." She paused, her mouth twitching. "Richard's staying at the hotel, huh."

"I guess," I shrugged. "Maybe it's best that Sharon comes alone. Considering that you and me and Jeff aren't exactly, like, getting along."

"No, Jeff and me are fine," Dawn said, arching her eyebrows. "Funny. The two of us are always fine. You're always the one who causes problems, huh." She turned back to her computer, "Yell to me when Mom gets here."

I sighed, standing back up and leaving the room. When I got down to the living room, Stacey glanced from the television to look at me. "She's still icing you, huh?"

"Can't you help?" I whined.

She shook her head. "May, she'll cool down, you have to give her space, remember? And she has therapy on Monday. Between seeing her mom and that, she'll be back to business. Seriously, you don't get how hard it is to be your sister, do you?"

I blinked at her, but Stacey jumped up to her feet. "On that note," she continued, swinging her finger like a baton, "I am off to meet your man at a sports bar to watch the Mets game. Or as he insists on calling it, the Reds game," she scowled.

"I thought you were a Yankees fan," I said.

"Oh, no, not after they refused to let go of Torre back in 2006," Stacey snorted. "Dad told me that it was time for us to face the fact that Steinbrenner was holding the franchise hostage, and we became Mets fans by Christmastime. Besides. One of the outfielders lives in Dad's building? Holy crap, is he a hottie." She fanned her face and wiggled her behind in the circle before grabbing her purse. She trotted over to the stairs and yelled, "Hey, babe? I'm outtie."

"I'll text you to come back," Dawn shouted.

"You promise you're staying here tonight, right?" Stacey asked, glaring at the ceiling.

"He's out of town this weekend," Dawn replied.

Stacey snorted and looked at me. "Oh, so I'm the default. I need to teach her a lesson. Maybe force her to come to one of my classes—see how she likes them business," she laughed. I tried to smile back, but it shook too hard. She yanked on one of my curls and headed out the door. I sighed, turning towards the living room where Jeff was hunched on the couch.

"What are you watching?" I asked, flopping down next to him.

He held up a DVD case. I adjusted my glasses and read _Friday Night Lights_. "I doubt it's yours," he snorted.

"You'd be correct," I said with a shudder. "Did you like watching their game this afternoon?"

It was like yanking up the shades in the morning: Jeff's face snapped to life, his eyes shining. "It was so cool," he gushed. "It was a bunch of the guys' team against the girls'? Damn, those girls play rough."

I laughed. "Those girls are the National Champions. They love to rub it in."

Jeff nodded. "Like I never really thought girls had skills, right? And they did get wiped, eventually, but they have such a command of the fundamentals, and it's, like, I sometimes forget how important it is to be clean and use the basic tools of the game, so it was a real, um, like, educational, I guess, thing. I learned a lot from watching the chicks do their thing."

"That's good, though I wouldn't call them chicks in front of Dawn," I noted, pointing upstairs.

Jeff grinned at me. "Right? She'd beat my ass in with a copy of _The Feminine Mystique_. Again."

I giggled, resting my head against the cushion behind me. Glancing at him, I asked, "So, um, do you think dinner will be okay?"

"You mean, do you think Mom can mediate a truce?" he replied, lacing his hands behind his head. "We'll see. Mom's pretty good at soothing Dawn. She knows everything, by the way," Jeff added, looking at me from the corner of his eye. "Right down to the fact that it's Stacey's professor. And that you were completely naked when you walked in."

I clapped my hand over my mouth as Jeff whistled a breath through his nose. "Dawn said your chest is really scary looking."

My mouth gaped open, and I jumped to my feet. "I, um, I have to check on the thing," I mumbled, dashing into the kitchen. I paced back and forth over the linoleum, wringing my hands. She had seen, and now Jeff knew, too, that I was some ugly _thing_. I slumped down to the floor, scooping J.D. into my arms. I buried my face into her neck and let myself cry into her fur. No more secrets now.

Isn't that what I wanted?

I reached into the pocket of my jeans and tugged out my phone, pressing a speed dial button and tapping my feet against the floor until Miranda answered. "Yellow, yellow, Maybelle," she sang.

"How are you, Miss Randa? Stoneybrook good to you?" I said, wiping my eyes.

"I hate it here," she chirped. "I'm gonna pull a mass murder right at Renwick's, just wait. Enjoy your taco salad, bitches! Now die!"

"Randa," I scolded. "Vista High makes that not funny. Maybe you should, I don't know, get a hobby?"

"My hobby is making fun of people," she declared. "I have a black belt in it, you know."

I laughed, leaning against the cabinets. "I can't wait to see you," I sighed.

"Your emails are the saddest things I have ever read," Miranda replied. "Yesterday's had Emily up in arms. They were on your bed, that is so gross. I hope you burned the sheets."

"They were just making out," I said, shaking my head. "If it was full on naked bodies and sex and stuff, I'm pretty sure you would have seen the bonfire from New England." I rubbed my forehead and admitted, "Part of me wants you to come right now, but the house is so crowded, I'm afraid that Logan would blow a fuse. He's been avoiding Dawn like it's his freakin' job these past two days."

"Maybe you and him should escape for a little out of town excursion," Miranda suggested. "Go hit the beach. Take Stacey—she seems pretty bearable lately, right?"

"Yeah, but still distant. She's like the friendly cashier who chitchats with you forever, but at the end of it all? She hands you your purchase and shows you the door. Oh, please come soon, Ran. You can pitch a tent in the garage," I moaned.

She giggled, "I'll set up shop in the back of the Buick. I'll buy myself a hot plate."

"Tell me something good," I pled. "You were so cryptic about Abe in your email. Are you really going to Hartford to see him?"

"Dude, I'm in the car right now," she exclaimed. "I'm going up to have dinner with his family. Shabbat Shalom, y'all."

"Good Shabbas," I smiled. "Wow, dinner with the fam. That's big, Randa."

I heard her hair rustle like the crunch of leaves. "I like him a lot. He's quiet, but he's got a real sharp sense of humor. We had a date, yeah, where we watched a movie over the phone last night? I mean, I'm always losing my shit during _Old School_, but he was so funny, I nearly wet my pants. He could totally take Will Ferrell in a joke-off."

"Them's fightin' words—don't tell Emmy," I warned.

"What's she gonna do, jump on a cross-country flight to rough up Abe? Let's see her try," Miranda crowed. "Okay, my lovely, I have to go—I'm approaching the city, and I have to read my Mapquest directions, drive, and smoke a cigarette at the same time. This is going to require all of my Mirandpower."

I howled with laughter, making J.D. race from my arms and snap at my feet. "Oh, Randa," I gasped. "Call me and let me know how it goes, okay? Good luck! Don't curse, either."

"Aw, fuck that," she snapped. "Love you, mommy-to-be."

"Love you, you saucy minx," I giggled, shutting the phone. I reached over and scratched J.D.'s ears. "We adore us some Randa, don't we, puppy baby."

She bobbled her head at me and snapped at my fingers. Yes, we do.

I got back up and walked up the stairs to use the bathroom. Again. Whenever I go to a new place, I love to read travel guides, city manuals and maps, getting my bearings and digging deep into the newness of it. To know everything about something strange and exciting. Knowledge, it's something to hold on to, to cradle like a precious thing. So I had decided to chart this pregnancy like I would New York City or Los Angeles or Italy.

Read until my eyes ached, and then read some more.

But I had a strange disconnect between the information and myself. Yes, I had morning sickness, yes, I had mood swings—well, really now—yes, I had to go to the bathroom every three hours. And I had a bit of an increase in my sex drive. Just a bit.

Still, every week's description of _How is Mom Feeling?_ talked about the developing breasts. How they're expanding and aching and growing heavy. How "Dad" will turn into a fawning teenager, unable to keep his hands off your burgeoning body.

And that wasn't me. Not at all.

I stole into my bedroom and flipped one of my books open—today was the first day of week ten. What to expect: blotchy skin, rash, flushes of heat, mood swings, slow increase of weight. I sighed: sounds like a party. But as I tossed the book back down, it hit another hardcover, sending that spinning to the ground. When I picked it up, my self-pity burned away. _The Evolution of Cancer Treatment_. Pages studded with Post-It notes, marked in Logan's handwriting with initials—"SC" or "BM"—my treatments, my chance, my cure.

I rested my hand on my stomach. Are you?

"Mary Anne, Dawn—Mom's here," Jeff yelled, opening the door. I raced down to the living room and peered out the windows. I watched Sharon kiss my father through the driver's widow of their car, her walking up the stone path to the front door. Him driving away without a look back. He didn't see me—he didn't want to. By the time Sharon reached the house, Dawn was in the foyer bouncing from foot to foot.

"Hey, Jeffie," Sharon exclaimed, throwing her arms around her son. "You look so tall, sweetheart—and tan, so gosh darned tan!"

"You, too, Mom," he grinned, holding her close. "Did you get a lot of beach time?"

"Tons," she gushed. "Mrs. Hijapi and I became beach bunnies after the first day. It was so lovely, just soaking my feet in the ocean and getting nice and brown. I was human toast," she laughed, stroking his face. "Oh, honey, what's going on?"

Jeff put his head on her shoulder, sinking right down into the little boy that hid in that rangy body. "I just miss you, Mom."

I shivered; I knew that, I did.

Dawn threw her arms around them. "Mom, I'm totally screwed," she moaned, tucking her head in between the two of them.

"I guess my vacation's over, huh," Sharon said, breezing those words over her children. _Her_ kids, the two of them blond and lean and tan, just like her. So alike, all of them, this bundle that was a family. I felt like I should take a photograph of them and place it in a textbook: this is what it looks like. This is what it is, to belong to someone.

I stared at my pale arms, touched my dark hair, ran a finger under my brown eyes. One of these things just doesn't belong here. How can you feel so out of place in your own home?

Sharon kissed her daughter's head, then her son's. And then she looked over to me. "Mary Annie," she smiled, beckoning me to them. The Schafers peeled away and let me walk into my stepmother's arms. "How are you doing?"

"Fine," I shrugged, but I saw Dawn and Jeff rolling their eyes at each other. I pulled back and glared at them. "What, you want me to say that things suck?"

"No, _May_, everything's always just perfect with you," Jeff said, squinting his face in a tight smile.

Sharon slapped his arm. "Stop it. All of you, stop it." She tucked her hair behind her ears and patted her pockets. "Where did I put…crimony, where is that thing?"

"What now, Mom?" Dawn giggled, glancing into Sharon's purse.

"Oh, I had…never mind. It'll turn up," Sharon sighed.

"Probably in the ice box," I nodded.

Sharon winked at me and clapped her hands together. "Dinner? I've been starved for an hour."

I gestured through the living room, and Sharon took my hand. I whispered, "I'm so glad you're here."

"Me, too," she replied, squeezing tight to me. "We're gonna make this right, don't worry."

We sat in an odd way around the table, Sharon and Dawn sharing a bench, me across from them with Jeff placed in the middle on the end. We passed around the bowls of food without a word, Sharon's eyes jumping to all of our faces, measuring our quiet and our tense way of sharing without touching.

As she cut her eggplant, she tapped her knife on the plate, making the ceramic vibrate in a cold way. "Kids, you are all being ridiculous," she announced, swinging the blade at each of us.

"Mary Anne's being her usual prissy self," Jeff shot back. "She won't forgive Dawn for Wednesday night, so she's just giving Dawn the Spier silent treatment."

"I have a right to be angry—Dawn was such a bitch to me and to Logan that night," I snarled. "Whenever Dawn hurts, she wants to make everyone around her more miserable than she is. And she can always make me feel bad about myself because she knows that I love her."

"You, like, worship Dawn," he said, curling his lip. "But you're so queer about it. Remember when you tried to force her into that makeover? You weren't happy with yourself, so you wanted _her_ to change for you. And now, it's like, you're so fuc—sorry, Mom," Jeff corrected, "freaking scared about what's going on, you, like, want Dawn to feel bad about herself. You're so whacked, Mary Anne."

Sharon reached over and grabbed his wrist. "Do not insult your sister like that."

"She's not my sister," Jeff muttered.

Dawn rolled her head on her neck. "Whatever. I'm just tired of Mary Anne passing judgment on me and my life. I have a therapist, so back off, Psych Girl."

"And, and," Jeff added, glaring at me, "it's like we have to treat her with kid gloves 'cause she's sick, right? She's sick, she's pregnant, we have to tiptoe around her and whatever, so we can never tell her when she's being a stuck-up snot. And even if we did, she'd probably sic Logan on us. It's not fair, Mom," he snapped, jabbing a bite of watermelon in his mouth.

I snapped my napkin across my lap. "Why do you hate me!"

"I don't hate you, Mary Anne. I'm just tired of your deal," he said.

"And what is 'my deal/'" I said with my most withering stare.

Jeff sneered at me. "Maybe you should go work that out in therapy."

Sharon threw her utensils down. "Alright, I've had enough. Jeffrey, you are being a total jerk to your sis—stepsister," she said, rolling her eyes. "Mary Anne is ill, she has a high risk pregnancy, you can't be antagonizing her—and that's not treating her with kid gloves, that's being an understanding, mature adult, as you insist you are," Sharon noted. "If you have problems with Mary Anne, you should sit down and discuss them with her like a rational man and stop behaving like a sour little boy."

She pointed at me next, the pink polish on her nail glinting in the light. "Sweetheart, you do have a habit of moralizing a bit too much. No one is good, no one is bad. Dawn is very sorry for the incident with Henry, you need to accept her apology and move on. And she is very sorry for lashing out—you two girls need to figure out a way to live together, or you should just separate. And that means, Dawn, you coming home to Stoneybrook or going back to LA to your father's."

"No!" Dawn gasped. "I don't want to go."

"Do you not want to leave or do you just not want to go there?" I mumbled, staring down at my plate.

Dawn exhaled in a noisy way. "I want to spend time with you, Mary Anne. I do. I'm sorry—I felt so trapped that night, I just…I don't cope very well with being cornered. Not since…" Not since Vista, I knew, staring at the dark shadow that past over her face.

I swallowed. "Maybe we could go to therapy together. Like couples counseling," I suggested with a wry grin.

"That's a good idea," Sharon urged, rubbing Dawn's back. "Why don't you give it until Mary Anne starts treatment. Though, I am going to say right now—this is Mary Anne's home, and if she wants you to leave, you leave. Understand me? You aren't even paying rent, you're merely a guest. You need to respect that."

Dawn glanced at me and murmured, "You wouldn't kick me out, right?"

"I don't want to," I answered, resting my head on a fist, digging those knuckles deep into my temple.

Sharon put her hand on Dawn's shoulder. "You need to tell Stacey, Dawn, or you need to end things with this man."

"Oh, Mom, why?" Dawn whined. "He's very nice, and—"

"And no," Sharon snapped. "Dawn? If something is worth doing, it's not worth hiding. You can't lie to your best friend. Either break things off with this guy or admit it to Stacey. No more of this cloak-and-dagger behavior. What does Harriet say?"

"The same thing," Dawn grumped. "I just—Stacey says she doesn't have a crush on him, and I believe her. She always tells me the truth," she sighed, poking at her food. "But he's her hero, he pioneered this new idea of socioeconomic cross-boundary theory, right, that she's hoping to use to graft on a feminist lens. And I'm just scared that she'll flip out. Though, it's not like we've slept together. Mom. Mary Anne," she thudded, staring at us. "He's a virgin."

"What!" I squawked. "He's a professor, he's, like, _old_."

"He's a total freak show," Dawn laughed, her eyes brightening. "It's so sad—like, when he started college, he was years younger than everyone, and he was a commuter, and so he had no friends other than his own profs. And then when he was in grad school, he couldn't go to bars and stuff for years so everyone ignored him there, too. He's never had a real girlfriend, and most people treat him like he's just an economics machine and not a real person. I think that's why he likes talking so much—you should see Stacey and her classmates, they never just _talk_ with him. They are always pumping him with school stuff. With me, we talk politics and pop culture and why in the world the Angels won't just get a decent bullpen."

I smiled at her. "Dawn, I love talking to you—you're so much fun. You must be the best thing that's happened to him in a long time."

"Yeah, but I don't want him getting too attached," she worried, "I'm outtie come August. Maybe I can introduce him to you, May. You're a really good listener, maybe you'd want to hang out with him? I think he just needs a friend," she said, rubbing her lips.

"Of course," I nodded. "Let's have a lunch this week, the three of us. And maybe Logan—I mean, if he likes talking sports, there you go."

Dawn nodded, beaming. "Henry would love that. A real guy friend, not some stuffy ass economics gray beard."

"What are you going to do, then?" Jeff asked, peering at his sister. "Tell Stace or break it off?"

My sister leaned against her mother. "Would you be with me if I told Stacey?"

"Do you want to do it tonight? Or tomorrow before Richard, Jeff, and I head out?" Sharon asked.

Jeff waved his hands, chewing quickly. "I want to stay here for a little longer."

"With me?" I snorted.

"We can work out our issues," Jeff said with a dewy smile. I narrowed my eyes at him as he reached over for his mother. "Come on, Ma, lemme stay here. Richard hates me, he thinks I'm a screw up, right? I can stay out of his hair—or lack of—down here," he snickered. "Besides, I'm learning a lot by just watching these guys play basketball. You want me to get a full scholarship somewhere, right? The better I play in the AAU tournament, the higher my chances are to land big money with San Fran U or Santa Clara."

"That would be nice," Sharon sighed. She looked at me. "It's up to you, Mary Anne. How much longer until summer ball starts, Jeffie? July first, right?"

"Yeah," Jeff said. "I can spend, like, some more weeks here, maybe train and stuff, and then I can come home and hang with the triplets. I convinced Jordan to join the team with me, did I tell you that? We're still working on Adam. Byron's a lost cause, though," Jeff added.

"Mary Anne?" Dawn prompted. "Can he stay? He'll be nicer, I promise."

"Yeah, promise," Jeff said, lacing his fingers together. "Come on, _sis_."

"Let me talk it over with Logan," I replied, folding my hands in my lap. "This is a really small house, and we've got a ton of guests coming in June, so I don't know how much we can take."

"I'll do all of the chores," Jeff blurted. "Mow the lawn, fix shit, scrub the bathroom? Anything. Besides. Kerry's coming, right, and she's the one in the bathing suit, right?" he said, gesturing to the living room. "She's a babe."

"She's very religious," I shot back.

"Oh, I know—she used to date Jordan. Doesn't mean that we can't have fun," Jeff said, tossing me a lazy grin. "I've never had a girl turn me down, especially an East Coaster."

Dawn giggled to me, "See, now this is worth him staying, watching Kerry kick Jeff's ass from here to Stoneybrook and back. Can't you just see her get all bossy commando on him? It'll be outstanding."

"She's a warrior, all right," I laughed. "Proceed with caution, Jeff."

Dawn picked up her cell phone and pressed a button, brushing aside her hair so she could put it up to her ear. Every part of her face looked tense, and she snuck her arm around Sharon's body as she said, "Stace? Can you come home? I need to talk to you about something."

As they talked for a moment, I turned to Sharon. "How's Dad?"

"He needs more time," she shrugged. "The twins thing threw him for a loop. He just can't handle how much this reminds him of what happened back with Alma. And—I don't feel this way," Sharon amended, reaching across the table to take one of my hands, "but I think he's very disappointed that you're pregnant while still in school. He's so proud of the fact that you're at Duke and doing so well, he can't see why you would do anything to jeopardize your success. You know your father—it's all about succeeding."

"I know," I murmured, pulling away from her. I cut my lasagna into small pieces, smaller and smaller until the food was mashed into a scatter spreading all over my plate. Something that couldn't be put back together. "I…I feel like I'm a disappointment, too. I mean, this isn't what I wanted from my life—we hadn't planned on a baby until we both made it through grad school—closer to thirty. And you know how hard it is to adopt," I said, shaking my head. "This is ten years sooner than we expected. And I feel like…like, everyone is so understanding when I say, I hope that this will be a match baby, right? Because before I add that part about the transplant, all of the people in the psych department give me this look like, Oh, you're throwing your career away. Oh, you're ruining your life." I pressed my hand against my lips. "Am I, Sharon?"

I bashed that hand up into my eyes to stop the crying. Stop crying! But I couldn't, and when Dawn hung up the phone, she came around the table to put her arms around me. "May, I'm so sorry—this was an accident, but you've always wanted to be a mother. This happened for a reason, right?" she whispered into my ear. "You have to believe that. A baby will save you, you'll never get sick again, and you'll be a creepy smart professor at some creepy smart school. Don't make me haul out my copy of Carmen Paglia, right, and teach you how women can manage a career and a family with aplomb."

"That's a great word," I sniffed, dragging my eyes over her shoulder.

"I know, right?" Dawn grinned. "I took it out of that vocab book in the bathroom. Just a little light reading for you, huh?" Dawn brushed a lock of my hair out of my face and said, "If there's anyone for whom becoming a mother will make her stronger and more capable? It's you, May. This is your dream, to be a mom. You're gonna be so fulfilled, you'll become so powerful, no one will stop you."

"You think?" I wavered, looking in her eyes.

"I know, for sure," Dawn declared, kissing my forehead. "I'm sorry, please forgive me. I was writing a lot about Sunny that day, and I was just on edge, and you just got in my line of fire, I'm so sorry. I don't know why I blast into you. I need to talk to Harriet about that. I really meant it when I said that I want to be your support this summer. I want to be your friend first and foremost."

"You need to apologize to him, too," I ordered, pressing a hand on her thigh. "He's such a great guy, you have to stop being so mean to him."

Dawn edged her eyes away from me and nodded. "I'll apologize. After I tell Stacey, I promise." She reached across the table and grabbed her plate and fork. "Okay, Mom, tell us all about Hilton Head. Was it incredibly posh?"

Sharon laughed. "Not exactly," she began. She told us stories of golfing, tennis, and the beach, the way the ocean crackled on the shore at night, the sand littered with starfish and the wilting bodies of jellyfish. Of my father's terrible sunburn. It rattled me, the idea of my father in pain, but I kept a benign curl on my lips during the rest of the meal. Sharon kept pushing more food at me, her eyes edging over the spindly line of my arms. I swallowed every bite, though, and she retreated back from that protective stance.

Mothering me, always.

By the time Stacey came back, we were finishing bowls of ice cream—though Sharon and Jeff were eating some awful smelling rice-based dessert. Stacey came into the dining room, sliding onto the bench next to Sharon. I heard the television snap on in the next room, filling the house with the loud sounds of the game.

"Who's winning?" Dawn asked.

Stacey smirked, "The Mets, naturally. Cincinnati's brought up a lot of good players from their Triple-A team—which just happens to be in Louisville," she said, rolling her eyes. "But they cannot compete with good old fashioned New York money. They have to groom good players, and then teams like the Mets swoop in and buy 'em up big. I love the free market."

"Is everything related to economics?" Sharon laughed.

Stacey blinked. "Yes."

Jeff stood up, "I think I'm gonna watch the game. Mary Anne? Wanna come?"

No. But I didn't want to be here, either. "Sure," I shrugged.

Dawn stood, too. "Stace, can you help Mom and me clear the table?"

I walked with my stepbrother into the living room, and his eyes caught mine, wincing a bit as he rolled them behind us. I raised my eyebrows back at him, and for a moment, we were bonded, him and I. Maybe he could stay. Maybe I could find out why he disliked me so much. I wasn't that bad of a person, right? I could convince him to like me. Everyone liked me, right? I was so nice.

I froze a bit. Maybe that was the problem. _Nice_. It was such a weird word. For so long, that was the first thing that people would say: _Mary Anne is a nice girl_. Such a good listener, so sensitive. What does that mean, though? It means weak. It means, _Be my friend, please, please don't leave me alone_. I grew up in a house that was decorated in silence and distance, I would do anything for closeness, just hanging back in a room full of people and watching how they moved together in a seamless way. How my old best friend Kristy could gather up friends like daisies, not afraid to make enemies or say whatever she wanted. She could make another friend, she could just move on. Not me, not me, sensitive, shy Mary Anne. I was raised to be best while being alone, and I was so hungry for people that I filled my mouth with bitter quiet. Be my friend, I'll never be bad to you.

Be my friend, I'll never leave you.

It was only to the people that I knew would never leave me—Kristy, then Dawn—that I opened up my mouth and let the words come out. And they came out so sharp, so mean and slicing sometimes. My old therapist, Dr. Paves, said that it was projection, putting all of the pain on the people who had to come back to me. Kristy, who needed me as her sycophant; Dawn, my sister. Bound to me by need and deed.

Like my husband, sitting with his elbows on his knees as he glared at the television. A take-out box was sitting closed in front of him, spilling out the scent of chicken and garlic and making my mouth bloom with hunger again. I sat down next to him, but he barely glanced at me, muttering under his breath about _lack of support_ and _poor fielding_.

I rolled my eyes and grabbed my favorite book from the end table next to the couch. _Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy_. A woman who had cancer when she was only a decade older than me, the youngest account that I had found of someone who had this disease. By now, the paper was dulled by so many reads, so many times I had grabbed it and went, I'm not alone. I glanced at her cover photo, the bright smile on her face the color of blood.

Maybe Stacey could do my makeup for my first treatment—I could slide in there, the picture of confidence. Still a woman, still whole as they ripped my body open again. I closed my eyes and let my fingers find a random page and began to read. I tuned out everything, the guys groaning on the couch next to me, the sound of water and dishes clanking on the basin of the sink, everything was gone except for me and Geralyn, our sickness, and our wants. To live, to be whole, to keep going.

Everything faded away, except: "You're screwing my professor!" Stacey screamed. And then a sound of breaking glass.

I jerked, dropping the book to the floor. Stacey came running into the room, Dawn following behind her. "Stacey, come on, please listen to me," Dawn pleaded.

"What, do you two talk about me? How stupid I am, huh? Does he tell you that I suck or something, is that why you couldn't tell me?" Stacey yelled, grabbing her purse and rooting for her keys.

"No!" Dawn cried. "We don't ever talk about you—but he thinks you're brilliant, Stace."

"Yeah, that's me, Stacey the brain and Stacey the boobs," she snarled back. "So much substance there, huh? You such a whore, Dawn. Couldn't you just not keep your hands to yourself? This is my deal, this is something that is only _mine_, and you had to come in and take it from me. How could you do this to me?"

Dawn flapped her hands by her side. "Stace, relax, this isn't a big deal."

"This is all I have," Stacey hissed, holding her purse to her chest. "This is all I have, and you're taking it from me. You know that, you know, and you're still doing this. How can you do this to me?"

"Stace," Dawn begged, drooping down into a crouch, so close to falling. "Please."

Stacey ran past the television, to the door. I stood up. "Stacey? Where are you going?"

"I'm gonna go drink until I forget all of this. I'm gonna drink until I forget or until my pancreas drops out of my body. Let's see which comes first," she announced, slamming the door so hard that the house shook, that the floor shook. The floor where my sister was sitting, her hands over her face as she cried enough to drown the world.


	10. Chapter 9

The doorbell rang at midnight, and my head popped up. I slammed my book shut and ran down the stairs just as Dawn was rushing out of her room. The two of us ran right into Jeff as he opened the door.

Keshawn was dragging Stacey through the door, her heels scraping over the kickplate as she struggled away from his hands. "Lemme go," she slurred, slapping her cheek against the door as she stumbled into the house. "He's very grabby," Stacey snapped, pointing back at him as she flopped onto the couch.

"You were kinda violent," he said, narrowing his eyes at her. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. "I found her at the shadiest bar in town—the only one that'll serve underagers? You know, Hepatitis Larry's?"

I tried not to grin. "Classy. Did you call Logan, tell him that you found her?"

"Yeah, him and Todd. Todd—what a waste. He went into Circle to check for her and decided to have a little time out for a beer or four. He said the new bartender's a babe," he noted with a wiggle of his eyebrows.

Stacey blew a raspberry at us. "You guys do not know how to have any kind of fun," she said, her eyes slumping down. "I coudda gone for another hour, two? Six! I had six shots," she announced, bouncing back up. She mimicked slamming down a glass and giggled. "Drinking is so fun! Why haven't I done it before?"

"Because your body can't handle it," Dawn moaned, hurrying over to Stacey's feet. She looked back at the three of us standing by the door and ordered, "Mary Anne, go get Stacey's blood sugar test stuff—it's in her purse. And her insulin kit, that's the red case. Jeff, I need some water, okay?" I grabbed Stacey's purse and came over to the girls, setting the cases at the floor next to my sister before treating back to Keshawn in the foyer. Far away from it all.

Batting Dawn away, Stacey hissed, "Donchoo be doing shit for me. You are such a dirty slut. How could you, huh?"

"I'm sorry," Dawn whimpered, dropping her head on Stacey's leg. "Stace, come on, you know that I'm sorry."

"So you know why I hate you so much, my blood? It wants to just, like, _poof_," Stacey said, flashing her fingers in the air. She recoiled from my sister, sliding away down the cushions. "'Cause you knew better. God damn you, you knew better!"

"But—you can be angry at me, I know, be mad at me, but you have to forgive me," Dawn begged. "I do so much shit to May, and she forgives me. Why can't you understand, I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't!"

"May forgives you because she's still the little girl in seventh grade who had no one else to sit with at lunch but you. Remember? She was going to sit alone when the Club had the huge fight? But there you were. You saved her from being all alone. Poor May, all alone," Stacey pouted, running a finger down her cheek. "And then! You saved her from being all alone with her dad, her precious sister. And so she's always gonna take you back. Haven't we learned that about Mary Anne? She'll always take you back. Where's Lee? Where is he, Example Number Two, where are you?" Stacey sang, glancing around the room. She giggled and bumped her head against the armrest. "May's a sad little girl under it all, but I'm not. So go fuck yourself, and then go fuck my professor since you're so damned good at it."

"She's trashed, and it's awesome," Keshawn whispered in my ear as Dawn continued to beg.

I elbowed him. "This isn't some show for you, Shawn." I rubbed my hands over my eyes. "Thanks for helping find her."

He shrugged. "What else was I doing tonight? Other than some underage drinking of my own. I think I'll head on over to Circle, see if I can flirt my way into a couple of Coronas."

"Why don't you call Erin, see if she wants to come out with you?" I suggested with a bright smile.

He frowned, licking his lips and tightening his mouth before saying, "Listen, I get that you want to set me up with her and all? And she's fun and cute and whatever, but she's kinda…pretentious? Always showing off that she's so damned smart or at least, that she's so much smarter than me. I'll give her a call when she's not barfing up her Duke pedigree, 'kay?"

"You think she's cute?" I gasped, grabbing his hand.

"Mary Anne? Chill," he said, patting my head. "Tell Lo I'll see him in the morning." He opened up the door and called back to the living room, "It was nice getting to know you and your flailing arms, Stacey."

"You wanna hook up? Let's do it," Stacey purred, leaping to her feet. Her ankles bent in, though, and she collapsed on the carpet. "Come on, I can be a slut just like Dawn."

"Go," I told him, shoving him out of the house. I walked over to Stacey and helped her back up to her feet. "Stacey, that's enough."

"Don't be a bitch to my sister," Jeff added, thrusting a cup of water at Dawn.

Stacey gulped down the glass and then tossed it onto the floor. It made a dull thunk before rolling towards Dawn's feet. My sister held it in her hands as Stacey glared at Jeff. "So. I gotta be nice to this bitch, but…you can be a real fucking jackass to May? That's so fair! Oh, my gosh, yes! What a fantastic world you've created! Maybe I should run from my problems like you, Jeffie," she said, wrinkling up her nose like a rabbit. Jeff glanced at me and then down at his feet.

"You need to test your blood, Stacey," Dawn whispered.

Stacey leaned down and grabbed the leather cases. "Screw you, I know what to do for myself. I'm going upstairs—don't you dare follow me," she demanded, "You can go sleep outside. Or maybe in May and Logan's room in J.D.'s crate. That's a perfect place."

She stalked up the stairs, her feet thudding on each step, before slamming the door to their bedroom shut. The pictures in the living room stammered with the force of it.

I sighed. "You can sleep here on the pull-out couch, Dawn." But she didn't answer; she just grabbed an afghan that I knitted and wrapped it around her body, turning her face to the back of the couch. "Dawn, do you want me to—"

"Go away," she sniffed, burrowing closer to the cushions.

Jeff grabbed my arm. "Give her space," he said in a low voice. And he pulled me out of the room as Dawn began to cry. I shook Jeff's hand off of me, and I ran up to my room. I went over to the armchair and grabbed my old teddy bear J.B., the one I used to clutch during chemotherapy. That I would bring with me when I was able to start treatment again. I went back downstairs and crept up to my sister.

"Dawnie?" I whispered, but she didn't turn around. "Um, I thought you might need a little…something to hold." I nudged her with the bear, and then set it against the plank of her back. As I walked away, I heard the rustle of her body; I peeked around the wall of the stairs and saw that she had curled around J.B., sobbing into the soft fur of its head. Logan had bought that for me, a bear that wouldn't rip apart, no matter how much abuse I gave it.

It could hold the weight of Dawn's tears, too. Though I wish she would just turn to me.

But I gave her my bear, and I gave her space, retreating back to my room. I stripped off my dress, walking to the dresser, and I ran my finger over the blue negligee that Dawn had chosen for me. I hadn't worn it yet, and I hadn't put on the white gown that I knew would drop my husband right down to his knees. Not yet, it wasn't right yet. Instead, I opened one of his drawers and yanked out one of his work out shirts, breathing deep the faint golded smell of ginger that always hung on his clothes.

By the time he came home, I was curling into sleep. I heard Logan moving around the room for a few minutes before he slid into bed. As his arms folded me against him, he asked, "So, Shawn brought her home okay?"

"Oh, sure, she got home just fine. And then it was like Nagasaki right in the living room. Stacey's furious at Dawn, and it seems like it's not _just_ the whole Dr. Collins thing. It's, like, this means a lot more to her? And it's scary because I have never, ever seen them fight in—holy crap, they haven't fought in six years, angel. That's an eternity."

"We haven't fought in a long time," he pointed out. "Maybe Stace and Dawn should have taken public speaking back at SHS. Fostered strong communication skills and all."

I giggled, turning slightly to kiss his cheek. "Don't be silly. This is really bad. Sharon's coming back for lunch? So I hope that she'll mediate this one on out."

"What time is the wedding?" he asked, settling his leg over my hip.

I reached down and rubbed his thigh. "Three. So, I'm gonna be dressed for it during lunch, as should you."

"Fair enough," he shrugged. There was a silence, and his breath roped over my ear. "I emailed Dr. Paves this morning. I asked her if she would have lunch with me on Sunday, and she said yes. I just want to talk some stuff over with her. Is that okay?"

"Of course," I nodded, but I looked back at him again. "About me?"

"No—well, kind of? I mean, we'll talk things out with Sarah, she's your therapist now, right, but I just…want to talk about the babies with her. She knows all of the shit with my family, I don't want to have to do exposition and back-story. I just want to go to someone who knows and say, Here's how it is now. Help me work out a battle plan," he stated.

"That's very grown up of you," I murmured.

"I've gotta be," he said. "It's not just me anymore. It's you, and it's them—or it, or whatever. I need to talk that out with her, too."

"Of course," I replied. I blinked, though, as he pulled away from me and got out of bed. In the silver shine of the moonlight peeking through the sides of the shades, his body looked ghostly, a sylph gliding through the room. He bent down to grab something out of the closet and came back to the bed, holding something out to me. I frowned, taking the bag from him. "What is this?"

"Open it," he urged, crouching next to the bed. I pulled the bag open and tugged out two books.

My breath jumped into my throat as I whirled up in to a sit. "_Pat the Bunny_!" I exclaimed, holding the book to the flat shelf of my chest. "Oh, I was going to buy this, Logan, good on you. We need to get _Goodnight, Moon_, too." I tapped it on his head as he beamed and pointed to the picture book still in my lap. "_Guess How Much I Love You_," I read, running my hand over the cover.

He shrugged. "I was in a bunny theme, I guess. It's two happy rabbits. I'm a sucker for happy bunnies. Lots of good Easter memories."

I flipped through the book, angling the pages into the pale light of the night. "I love you to the moon and back," I breathed, tracing the illustration with my fingers. "Oh, angel. I'm glad you were in a bunny theme." I put my hands on his face and kissed him before flipping my body to reach under the bed. "Here, here, I got something, too."

The shopping bag was smaller than his, and it let out a soft wrinkling sound as he reached inside and pulled out a little bundle the color of lemons. Logan let the yellow fabric fall open, a small towel with a duck's head emerging from a corner. "You fold the baby in and make it a duck," he grinned. "Make way for duckling. Oh, we need to get that, too." But then he fell quiet, wrapping the soft terry cloth around his hands and holding it to his heart, sinking back down on his heels. I put my hand on his head and circled over the downy lawn of his hair as he sat there, swallowing over and over again, that smile creeping larger on his face.

He shifted forward and spread the towel over my lap as he lifted my shirt. Logan knocked the duck's head against my stomach. "Hey. Hey," he called in a quiet voice. "How you doin' in there?"

I put my hand on his and pressed it to my belly. "Totally bored," I giggled. "But fascinated by how strange our family is."

"Or traumatized. You're never coming out, are you?" he sighed. His eyes caught mine. "You. Them?" His face tensed and twitched. "Pretty girl? I'm so confused. I want them both, but I can't stop—"

"I know," I breathed, sighing onto his body as he put his head in my lap, so close to them. Did they feel him? Did they know how much we loved them already and how much it hurt? "I know."

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"How do I look?" I asked him.

"Like I want to take that dress off of you again," Logan said, grabbing at the hem.

I swatted his hands away. "No. One is all you get," I giggled, grabbing the jewelry box with my earrings. I plopped down on the bed and carefully pulled out one of the small studs, feeding it through the hole in my lobe. I had pierced my ears back in high school, but it was always a thrill to feed the stems of an earring into my skin.

Barbara had been with me, squealing as I shrieked at the sound of the piercing gun.

Pushing the back in place, I winked at him. "Have I told you again that I love my Christmas present?"

"Just every time," he smiled, tugging the tie around his neck. "I'm so glad you love them. I wanted to really show you how much you meant to me during the whole rehab deal. You were so kind, even when I was at my most whiny and pitiful. Which was pretty much every day," he mumbled, his hand drifting up to his shoulder.

"Yeah, well, I'm not saying that diamonds weren't a fabulous thank you, but I didn't need them," I said, tipping my eyes to the ceiling as I put in the other stud. "We're a team. And it was my turn to carry the load for us, angel."

"I like it when we share," he replied with a crisp nod, snaking the tail of the tie through its knot and tightening it into place. He stood up and smoothed his hands down the front of his shirt. "Do I look decent enough to go to a wedding where we won't be able to understand one damn word?"

"Dr. Paves said there would be a translation card available for the dozen of us _gringos_," I clucked. "And you, husband, look good enough to marry."

He tucked a curl behind my ear and bent down to kiss me. "Well, we can always corral the priest and have him do it all over again."

"I'll slip him a fiver," I laughed, standing up and walking to the mirror. I tugged the dress down, running my fingers over the soft lavender shade. I twisted the yellow stones in my ear and smiled at my reflection. Look how good you look, Mary Anne. Shake it off.

Shake off that odd hollow feeling that was creeping into my bones, a fatigue that left me so heavy that it took an hour to convince myself to wake up. Shake off that strange thickness that layered in my head, cottoning over my ability to think about anything other than _not moving_. It was only when Logan came back from his workout and put his hands on my forehead, asking, "Are you okay?" that I was finally able to spring into life.

"You don't have to pretend with me," he sighed.

"I know—but you're motivating me to get out of bed, right?" I replied. He tipped his head back and forth as I hurried to the bathroom, staring at the shut door that led to Stacey. It was eleven in the morning, and she hadn't left her room, either.

I tapped on the door. "Stace?"

"Sleeping—stupid alcohol," she groaned. And I rolled my eyes, heading to the shower. When I walked by the door again, there was the soft sound of snoring floating from under the door. So I got dressed.

And then undressed and dressed again.

"Mary Anne!" Sharon was yelling. "Dawnie and I just put lunch on the table. Can you get Stacey and Logan?"

"Can I get you?" I asked, turning back at him.

"I suppose," he shrugged, grabbing his suit coat from the armchair. He waited for me as I knocked on Stacey's door. Nothing.

"Stacey?" I called. "Lunch."

"I'd rather eat my own flesh than sit with Dawn," she trilled.

I let out a noisy exhale and looked back at Logan with an annoyed twist on my mouth. He glared at the door and stalked over, banging it on and making it yelp against the wood of the frame. "Anastacia McGill, getcher ass outta there, or else you can find your own damn place to live for the rest of the summer. Where you'd have to pay rent, for the record."

A moment later, Stacey jerked the door open. "Tight ass," she grunted, moving past us and down the stairs. She slumped into one of the high backed chairs as Sharon sat to the left with Dawn on her side. Jeff took the other chair, so I slipped onto the other bench next to my husband. Distance between me and my brother.

"Did you two have a good morning?" Sharon asked, looking at the two guys.

"Totally," Jeff gushed. "We took a run through campus, and then they showed me their workout, and it's so hard. It's gonna make me so ripped by the end of the summer." Jeff spooned a large helping of pasta salad on his plate as he glanced at me. "Did you two talk yet?"

"About?" Logan prompted, taking the bowl from Jeff.

"Me staying for a couple more weeks," Jeff answered. "I will be Handyman Extraordinaire. I'll take care of the lawn and all of the housework. This place will be so clean, you'll be able to make the toilet into a punch bowl. Come on—I really want to keep watching Logan's training and, like, be with Dawn," he added, shuffling his fork over his plate.

Sharon narrowed her eyes at him, but she glanced up at Logan and me after a moment. "This is your decision. And don't feel obligated to say yes. I was hoping that he'd come home—I mean, when this AAU thing starts, I'll barely have any time with you, Jeff."

"Come on, guys, say yes," Dawn wheedled.

"Don't pressure them," Stacey snapped. "It's their house, not yours."

"Oh, yeah? Then maybe they should tell you to not take over the bedroom—Dawn couldn't get any work done this morning because you were holding all of her stuff hostage," Jeff shot back, filling his mouth with food.

"Guys!" I yelled. "Cool it!" I looked up at Logan and shrugged. "It's your call. I honestly don't care. Your scholarship is paying for the place. I think it's your decision."

Logan sighed, putting down his knife in mid-stroke. "Well, okay. Jeff, if Mary Anne says that you've been a dick to her again, it's done. I will bounce your ass outta here so quick, you're gonna think you're a ball. Understand?"

"Yes," Jeff mumbled, his eyes dashing from the two of us down to his lap. "I appreciate it, thank you."

"Whatever," Logan replied. "It's important to her that you two get to know each other. Otherwise, I'd have Sharon take you home now. So, thank Mary Anne."

"Thanks, Mary Anne," Jeff said. He looked at his mother. "Mom and I talked it over, about my behavior. And I want to apologize. Lashing out is kinda a Schafer trademark. I'm sorry." Sharon smiled at him, and he gave a weak grin back.

Whatever, I thought, stabbing a piece of chicken. Jeff didn't want to apologize—he just wanted to stay here. Here, which was not there: California. Why was he so desperate to stay away from his father and stepmother? I stared at him for as long as I dared before taking another bite.

We ate in silence for a long while before Dawn sighed. "Stacey?"

"Don't," Stacey said, wiping her mouth with her napkin. "Don't even."

"Can I at least go into the bedroom?" Dawn asked, pulling on the neck of her shirt. "I need to change, I need to get my stuff."

Stacey gave her a grin so false that my teeth ached. "Oh, sure you can," she chirped. "You can have the room, actually. I'm gonna move on down to the bomb shelter. Jeff can share with you, and maybe you can figure out a way to stab him in the back."

"You're gonna live in the basement," Logan said slowly. "Are you nuts?"

"Nope," Stacey protested. "It's quiet, I can get a lot of work done, and I can come in and out of this door," she said, pointing at the sliding door in the dining room, "without having to see Dawn. Unlike the other guests in this home, I will be respectful and well-behaved. A blithe spirit of a house mate, as it were." She grabbed a grape and popped it into her mouth.

"You're just going to avoid me," Dawn spat.

Stacey nodded. "After this lunch? You don't exist in Staceyworld. I'm sure that Mary Anneland will be happy to give you a working visa, though. Right, May?"

"Stacey," I warned. "I don't want to get into your fight. Since you don't want me to," I added in a sharp tone.

"Exactly, it's none of your business," she said lightly.

Sharon rubbed her forehead. "You girls are acting like you are thirteen years old."

"No offense, Sharon? But your husband had a temper tantrum and committed domestic violence on his own daughter. I don't think you get to tell me who is acting childish or not," Stacey retorted. She grabbed her plate and glanced around the table. "I think I've said enough. I'm gonna take this upstairs, pack on up, and move. Jeff? If you wouldn't mind helping me, you can have yourself a real place to sleep within twenty minutes."

Jeff looked at Dawn, who waved him to follow. After the two of them left the table, Dawn slumped against her mother. "I thought she'd have relaxed by now," Dawn cried, wringing her eyes closed. "Mom, what do I do?"

"I don't know," Sharon murmured, stroking Dawn's hair. "You can't press it—you know how Stacey shuts down. Just pull back, let her have the space she wants. Live and let live."

"Not with her," Dawn sniffed. "She's my light, Mom. She's been my best friend for so long, I don't know what I'll do without her to talk to every day."

"You can talk to me," I offered. I bit my lip and looked down at my lap, at the hand that Logan had laid there. I put my fingers over his and took a deep breath. "I can't be Stacey, but I can be that person for you, if you want."

Dawn just looked at me, blinking in almost lazy way. "Yeah," she whispered, gazing at me. "I'd like that."

Maybe she would tell me what was going on.

Or maybe she would keep secrets piled between us like sandbags, keeping the truth away as if it were a raging river. What wasn't I supposed to know?

Her?

Sharon let out a loud breath, humming her lips together. "Well. This was spectacular," she droned.

"All we need now is Richard to show up and yell at May again," Dawn sighed, straightening back up.

Sharon knotted her hands in her hair. "Actually, he should be here any moment. He wanted to get on the road by one." Her eyes brushed over my face. "I think he wants to talk to you, Mary Anne."

I nodded, taking another bite. That way I wouldn't have to say anything. Sharon and Dawn began discussing some mutual friend back in California, so I took their distraction to poke Logan. "You'll stay with me, right? I mean—just in case—"

"I'll break his jaw," he said, so low I strained to hear him. "You better know that. If he dares touch you, I will break his jaw, Mary Anne. I'll crack it right off of his face, and I'll absolutely be okay with being arrested for it, I don't care. But you better know, that's what I'll do if he tries anything with you again."

I puckered my lips and pressed my hands against his. "Only if he touches me," I relented.

"If he calls you anything bad, I might hit him. Not that bad, but something. Maybe I should slap him, let him know how it feels," he grumbled, striking hard into his chicken.

The door creaked open, and I watched my father walk into the house. No warning. As if he lived here, as if my home were his home. I straightened back up and then slid away from the table, meeting him in the living room.

"Dad," I said.

"Annie," he replied. His face grew soft around his mouth and eyes. "You look very pretty."

"Thank you—I have a wedding to go to," I told him, pulling at the skirt. For a moment, his eyes clouded, and I realized how much it must have hurt him that I got married without him. Without telling him a thing. It was my life—he had shoved me out years ago, telling me that I was the one to control this life, trusting me to make the decisions that he thought he didn't have the right to make. It didn't mean that he wasn't judging me. It didn't mean that it didn't hurt him.

I had stood with my lover and married him while my father sat at his desk and filed important motions and important documents. All of these important things that he did every day. While I did the most important thing of my life.

_My_ life.

Did he wish he were still a part of it?

Dad's eyes grew distant again, retreating back to the place he had found the first time I had gotten sick. "Have you started treatment yet?"

"No, not until June," I answered, looking at my hands. They started to shake as I added, "When I'm in the second trimester."

"So, you're going to continue this pregnancy," my father sighed, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a handkerchief. He dabbed the cloth over his forehead, snapping it out in a crisp way before folding it back up in a small square. "You're going to bring a baby into your illness."

"Yes, we are," Logan said, walking up next to me. He put his arm around my shoulders and shook his head. "This could save her—she might never get sick again with a transplant. It's something that neither of us can give her, why don't you get it? Why can't you understand that we need to do everything to save her?"

"So, you don't want a baby, you want a cure. And when Mary Anne dies, I'm sure your child won't feel guilty about that at all," Dad snorted, shaking his head at my husband. "Your child won't ever hate herself because she couldn't save her mother, I'm very certain. Or will you just lie to her? Tell her that she was always wanted?"

I slammed my hand against Logan's chest, holding him back. "Don't," I snapped.

"He just insulted me, you, our family? Get the fuck out of my house," Logan yelled, pointing at the door, his face growing crimson at the edges. "Just get out. God, you are so worthless. Get out, don't you dare say another word to us, just go."

My father blinked at us, a thing of stone, before turning on his heel and striding away. Stacey and Jeff came bounding down the stairs, their arms full of clothes and bedding, turning into the study before peeking back at us. I watched Dad thunder out to the car and rest his hands on the hood.

"I can't," I cried, running to the door and out onto the lawn and to my father. "Dad," I called out. "Dad, please don't hate me."

Dad's head rose up, the sunlight catching on the slick curve of his skin. He looked so old now, the age of a grandfather. Would he ever hold my baby? Would he want to?

Would I want him to?

"I don't hate you, Alma," he choked, putting his hands over his eyes. "But why are you doing this to me? Allie, why?"

I took a step back. "It's Mary Anne, Dad. Not Alma."

His eyes flew open with the speed of shock, boring into me and finding the Mom-shaped place in me. It was all he saw anymore, wasn't it. I was her, a woman with dark hair and brown eyes and a baby. When my mother was pregnant, her cancer was beginning its slow tumble into life, that tumor baking in the deep of her breast and rising into the hard truth of her mortality by the time I was learning to talk, to walk, to be not a baby but a little girl.

On my first birthday, they gave her six months to live. She lasted that long—no, five months, fifteen days. A woman with dark hair and copper eyes, glasses for reading, a book always in her purse. A woman with a baby and a cancer.

But not Alma. Not his Allie. His Annie instead.

The air clouded over in an orange breeze, and I watched my father take it into his lungs, clutching hard to the swing of her all over us. Tell him, Mom. Help me.

But he stared at me like he had been slapped himself, reeling back and throwing himself into the car, thrusting his head into his hands. Sharon came walking out behind me and put her hands on my shoulders.

"He called me by her name," I breathed. "Alma."

Sharon squeezed me hard, right down to my bones. "I'll keep talking to him. Don't give up on him—I won't, so don't you give up on him, either. But, I love you, Mary Anne."

"I love you, too, Sharon. Thank you for everything. You are such a wonderful mother," I told her, my voice catching too hard on that word. Her eyes glinted with tears as she touched my face before turning towards my father, his car, his way to leave me. I watched her slide on over to the car, and she waved at me as the car drove away. He kept staring ahead, and I could feel the tight grip of his fingers on the rubber wheel. Holding onto it, holding on to what he could. It was real, it was there. But I kept staring at their car as it moved away and out of sight, staring at the shadow that it had left behind.

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The sounds of Spanish hit my ears, rolling into my body like a curl of heat. So fast, so excited: there was so much happiness sewn on each word. I didn't understand any of it, but I knew. This is what it is like to bear witness to a moment of grace.

Bells rung from the cathedral tower, shining over the spring-thick grass that circled the church. Small clumps of people meandered towards the massive oak doors, arms slung tight to each other as they put kisses on each cheek. Two kisses, always.

"I wish we knew the people here," I said, taking Logan's hand as we walked up the stone drive to the church doors.

"I wish I knew what they were saying," he replied, straining to hear a knot of girls that were bustling by. "Most everyone is speaking Spanish? But I'm pretty sure that them folks were just talking in Portuguese."

I smiled at him, switching his hand into my left one, putting his arm over my shoulders. "Them folks. Sometimes, you are such a hick."

"You can take the boy outta Kentucky, but thank the Lord, you can never take the Kentucky out of the boy," he stated, popping a fist in front of him. He looked around the crowd outside of the doors as we approached. "Do you see Dr. Paves?"

"She said she'd meet us here," I shrugged, standing up on the ball of my foot to peer around for her. I rolled my eyes—if he, ten inches taller, couldn't spot her, how could I? After a moment, he gripped my hand and pointed to the left.

"There's your lady," he teased, and I clapped my hands, leaving him behind as I sliced through the jubilant bunch to hurl myself at my old therapist. My therapist, my teacher, my savior, my friend. I rocketed my body into her, and she laughed, picking me up off my feet and kissing my forehead.

She pulled back and squeezed my shoulders. "Ms. Spier, did you miss me?"

"Stop it, I'm gonna ruin my eye make-up," I sniffed, waving at my eyes.

Laughing, she pulled me in for another hug. "Well, I have a present for you. Hold on." She poked her husband, and he waved at me. I gave him a shy smile back; I had never really felt comfortable around him, no matter how nice he was. Maybe because I didn't know what to call him, this other Dr. Paves. That was her name. I didn't want to share it with him.

But he reached over and tapped the back of a man rivering Spanish at some young woman dressed in a skirt with small yellow flowers floating above her knees. And that man turned around and beamed at me. "Hey, May," Eddie winked. I slapped my hand over my mouth to stop my scream before I lunged at him, too.

After a moment, I stepped back and stared at the two of them, brother and sister. Psychiatrist and psychologist: they had linked me in their care for four years and helped me weave a strong self from the battered pieces of Mary Anne. They made me love myself, accept myself, be the Mary Anne who I wanted to be. Just me, that was enough.

I was in full tears now, and I reached into my purse to pull out a Kleenex to dab my eyes. "What are you doing here?" I squealed, giving Eddie a light punch.

"Oh, hello, I totally wrote her a letter of rec to get into Duke," he laughed. "Girl owed me a reception with a free bar, are you kidding? And, I'm hoping to meet some very attractive bridesmaid. Since, you know, Reese Witherspoon turned me down again."

"Maybe it's because she's married," I offered, reaching forward to give him another hug.

"How are you doing?" he asked, holding my face in his hands. "Not, like, psych-wise. We'll talk about that later. Just how are you _doing_."

"I'm really happy to see you both," I stammered, holding the tissue to my eyes again.

Dr. Paves put her arm around me and kissed my temple. "Your poor husband is standing next to the church doors looking totally abandoned. Perhaps we should go to him."

"Oh, who cares. He plays for The Enemy, we have no sympathy for that," Eddie snorted, putting his hands on his hips. "I hope you punished him but good when we lost to them in February."

I laughed, "Very big punishment. I made him watch _Love Actually_ and _A Room with a View_. He was practically catatonic from all of the estrogen. But, he won't admit it? But he really liked _Love Actually_."

Gaping, Dr. Paves exclaimed, "Oh, my God, who doesn't love that movie! Uncle Billy? Hugh Grant with the dancing and the singing? And when Colin, my boyfriend, charges down to get—"

"Aurelia in the village, I know!" I squealed, and we grabbed hands and wiggled with excitement. Eddie stared at us in horror and then swung his arms in a mocking way, letting out a high-pitched shriek as he jerked around as if electrocuted. We glared at him for a long moment.

"He's such a loser," Dr. Paves grumbled, putting her arm around me. She gave me a hesitant look, flickering her eyes down at my stomach. "I can't tell yet, Mary Anne."

"Can I?" Eddie asked, clenching his hand in front of me. I nodded, and he slid his hand on my belly, those fingers fluttering against my dress. "When can we feel kicking?"

I shrugged. "My OB said, since I'm kinda thin?"

"Kinda?" Eddie snorted, and Dr. Paves reached out and slapped his head.

"Maybe as soon as twelve weeks, but probably not for another four, and then definitely by the twentieth week. I'm really excited for it," I admitted, slinging my lips to the side and chewing on the corner.

Eddie and Dr. Paves both crouched down in front of me. "Hello, babies," Dr. Paves cooed. "It's your Auntie Ana. You better be good to our May, got me?"

"Or else we'll make you run," Eddie laughed. "Run and hit things."

"They'll need therapy from their first moment now—getting threatened," I grinned, but my smile slumped a little. "They, it…oh, guys," I sighed.

Eddie straightened up and took my hand. "Not until we hit the open bar," he told me, shaking his head.

"There will be no open bar for Mary Anne!" Dr. Paves squawked. "There will be lots of healthy orange juice and water. We'll get the dad nice and drunk, though."

"He doesn't drink—he bet that Coach of his a hundred bucks that he would wait until his twenty-first birthday. And you know Logan—if Coach told him to jump off of the tallest building here in Raleigh, he'd be all, 'Would you like me to land on my head or on my feet?'" I said, letting out a snort.

"Gross. Coach Williams. I feel dirty just hearing about him. Tell me that Mr. Enemy over there won't be talking about him or _that team_," Eddie snarled, hooking his arm with mine. "They beat us, they beat my Texas in the NCAAs? It's like, could you have picked a more hideous man to marry?"

Dr. Paves took my other arm, holding onto her husband, too. "Sure she could have. She could have married Satan himself—the horrible Dean Smith."

Eddie's face peeled back in horror, and I leaned against him as I laughed. When we reached Logan, Eddie glared at him. "You are taller than I remember."

"Thank you?" Logan replied, shifting his eyes to me. I shrugged as he walked down the steps to hug Dr. Paves, kissing her on the cheek. "Hey, Doc."

"You look very nice," she smiled. "I am very excited for lunch. Do you mind coming down here to the city? We don't have a car, so I can't come up to you."

Logan nodded at her as Eddie pulled on my arm. "Come on, let's hustle before all of the Brazilians take the good seats in the church. I want to be in direct view of the bridesmaids. Scope out my territory."

I gave him a thumbs up and waited for my husband to place his hand on my waist, circling his thumb over that small sunrise of bone and skin as we followed my old shrink and my old therapist inside. As we walked into the church, the four of them crossed themselves, bending down on their knees and crossing again before entering our row. We settled in a pew in the middle of the bride's side, surrounded by the bright language of Brazil, the guests passing around large sacks of tropical flower petals and small vials of holy water. I took a handful of flowers and looked at Dr. Paves with a question in my eyes. She poked her husband, and he grinned.

"We toss them after the groom arrives," he explained. "He will walk in, and then we wait for the bride. She has to be late to the ceremony, at least ten minutes? But no more than thirty. Anyway, we throw the flowers and sprinkle the water because she wears shoes of gold, and we bless her steps. My brother-in-law is making this as Brazilian as possible, it's sick."

"And," Dr. Paves added, poking her brother. "I hate to say, there aren't bridesmaids, per se. The bride and the groom each have three couples standing for them. You won't be able to tell which ladies are single or not. Sorry, _nino_."

"It adds to the challenge," Eddie gritted, staring around the room. "Rafi, your family has a lot of fine Latinas for me, I can find myself a girl. I just love the shiny dresses."

"Did you have any attendants?" Dr. Paves asked me.

I nodded. "My best friend from Duke and his closest pal from the team. They weren't, like, fancy, though. They only had a day to get ready. We'll do it again, though. Maybe you could be my matron of honor," I added with a sly grin.

"Bite your tongue," she glared. "Shiny dresses make my ass look huge."

I laughed, kissing the hard knob of Logan's wrist bone. He rested his head on mine and told her, "Oh, come on, Doc. Every girl dreams of a booty, right?"

"Oh, he called you a girl—it's been a good fifty years since that's happened, huh?" Eddie smarmed, and she reached across her husband and struck her brother's leg. I laughed and then knocked my fist against Logan's knee. "Look, look, there's the groom."

Yelena's fiance, Benji, strode across the front of the cathedral with three couples in tow, shaking hands with the priest before glancing at his watch. Small knots of people in the church began singing a sweet melody with words that were unknown and yet lovely. I heard the three adults on my side take bets on how long it would take for the bride to show, and I tapped my husband's arm.

"You made me wait," I whispered, and he winced.

"I'm sorry," he whined, pushing out his lower lip. "Traffic on the highway was murder that day."

I tickled his waist, and he pulled me against his chest, kissing my heap of curls. "Excuses," I scoffed. "But—your song came on the stereo as you came running up. It was like it was waiting for you, angel."

"God bless Erin's iPod stereo, and God bless Erin for downloading the theme from _East of Eden_," he beamed. "What a sweetheart. You made us a great mix, but that was an inspired choice on her part."

"And it was the 1981 version. Not from the inferior 50s movie adaptation," I recited, imitating him. _Nawt frum thuh enfarier fifties muhvie adahptashun._

"Watch it, pretty girl, or I'll hook up with Eddie and find me a shiny dressed non-bridesmaid," he threatened, pointing up at the attendants standing next to the increasingly impatient groom. Benji was shifting from foot to foot, staring at his watch and mouthing out the march of seconds. Every minute counted to him, and he was watching them all.

The singing ended, and another song began, and in a blur of motion, arms flung up flowers that arced onto the aisle. I took a small pinch of petals and flew them up to the ceiling and over to where the bride would cross, crushing the sweet smells of her home deep under her blessed feet. Some of the flowers that Eddie and the Paveses were throwing drifted down on me, tangling up in my hair. I touched them, but I didn't move them—I wanted the crown of color in me, on me. Stay there, stay with me.

Logan flickered the water over the carpet, taking a little to cross himself before passing the vial down the aisle. The others crossed themselves as well, then standing and sending droplets like rain over me. I touched a spot of water on my forehead and mimicked them, that Catholic motion of head, lymph nodes, heart, lung.

The latter three were broken in me. A lymphatic system full of cancer, a lung sprouting tumors. A heart that had stopped twice. And a head that had been so scarred by it all that it shut down and slept for three weeks. I crossed myself again and again until my fingers went dry. Logan pulled a petal off of his lap and strung it over the line of my dress, a straight thing that cut just above network of scars and the sling of my catheter. I grabbed his hand and pulled it to my mouth, kissing his knuckles as the singing and the rain of color and water continued through the cathedral.

The organ drenched the church in music, and I hear the massive creak of the doors shutting. She was here. I glanced over at Dr. Paves, and her face tightened in excitement. I turned around to look at the back of the church as Eddie crowed, "Ten minutes on the dot—I _told_ you that Yelena couldn't wait!"

"She's waited four years, she could wait another thirty," Dr. Paves's husband sighed, reaching into his wallet and handing over a twenty dollar bill.

"Four years?" I gasped. "No way I could do that."

"Yeah, we noticed," Dr. Paves laughed. "They wanted to wait until they both finished their PhDs—they wanted to be married as Doctor and Doctor Figuerosa. Some people, you see, like to take their husbands' last name. Just sayin'."

"I think Dr. Spier has a nice ring to it," Logan announced, sticking out his tongue at her. She echoed his face, and they began laughing over my head.

I tapped the edge of the pew, waiting for the doors to open again. "Maybe I should just take your name," I blurted out. "Dad doesn't want me. You do. Why am I holding out?"

"Because you've done so much in your field as Spier, Mary Anne," he said, narrowing his eyes. "And if you didn't want to be Spier, then you should be a Baker before you're ever a Bruno. These are things that are important to you, don't be silly."

I smiled at him as the doors flew open; two small girls hurling rose petals came shuffling by. Three more couples paraded down the aisle, and then the congregation rose in a wave as Yelena walked in, escorted by a man with a thick cap of silver hair. Her large white dress hushed against each pew; with each step, I could see the tips of her gold shoes sneaking out, kicking the petals up in to the air and onto the hem of her belled skirt. Even from behind the film of her veil, I could see her smiling, those lips so red, they bled through the almost opaque netting.

I reached into my purse for my reading glasses, passing Logan his as well so we could read the translation sheet. He whispered that it was a standard Catholic wedding, and I shrugged. Like I would know. We stood for a long time as Bible readings were performed in both Portuguese and Spanish, and I gaped at Logan as he seemed to know exactly when to speak with the congregation, though he answered each call from the priest in Italian, almost sounding like the Spanish speakers to my left. He circled his hand over his forehead, his lips, his heart. He bent his head at the right times and crouched into a kneel before glancing at the translation card.

"You can just sit," he whispered, patting the pew.

So I did. And when the vows were recited, I took his hand and stared only at him. I only vaguely registered how the bride and the groom both had engagement rings on their right hands, a mutual promise that they changed onto their left fingers. Logan took my own left hand and kissed the place where my rings were, and I put my right hand over my stomach. It took everything in me not to kiss him as they sealed their own vows in the same way. I was selfish: I wanted this kind of wedding, too, all of this ceremony rich like warmth and a thickness of feathers. I wanted to sink into it. I wanted it to be me.

The couple bent over to sign their wedding license as we in the church applauded, an explosion of whistles and feet stamping echoing in the church. The priest called out another prayer, and Dr. Paves touched my shoulder. "It's time for the Sign of Peace," she smiled. "Peace be with you, Mary Anne." She kissed each of my cheeks and shuffled past me to reach to my husband. I turned to Eddie, and he said the same. _Peace be with you_. Eddie, Dr. Paves's husband, so many strangers from the pews abutting us. Everyone was leaving their seats and mingling around to exchange hugs and kisses, holding hands tight and exchanging this greeting, this blessing, this promise.

As I found my place again, there was a hand on my arm. "Peace be with you, _tesorina_," Logan smiled.

"And you, husband," I told him, taking his hands in mine. This time—this time, we kissed under the sound of the exclaiming bells.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Alright," Eddie sighed, clanking his empty glass onto the table. "I'm buzzed enough to deal, yet not drunk so I can make sense. Let's talk this out."

"Yes," I nodded, sipping my juice. "I'm so terrified, I absolutely need your help."

Dr. Paves leaned on her elbows and looked at me. "Already feeling the depression?"

I nodded. "I'm beginning to sleep a lot more, I'm feeling really sluggish. Not, like, cloudy-headed? But it takes me a long time to warm up. And these journals—they take a lot out of me," I murmured, looking down at my hands. "I read one yesterday? About a woman who was taking a shower, and the water turned to acid and burned off all of her skin. And she said that the next day, she was just lashing out at everyone around her—she said she was trying to make everyone hurt, too, and the day after, she began a bad low cycle. So I went to take my shower, and I literally just stood there and watched the water for ten minutes before I would go in. It never used to hit me like that."

Taking in a deep breath, I asked, "Does that make me crazy?"

I waited for it: _Mary Anne, do you need us to validate you? Mary Anne, are you fishing for some kind of affirmation?_ But the two of them just stared at me, stroking my face with their concerned eyes.

"It doesn't make you crazy, but this isn't healthy," Dr. Paves sighed, swirling the ice cubes in her drink around with the stir stick. She grabbed her lime slice and eeked out a few more drops from the wedge. "The problem is, what is causing this?"

"It could be simple withdrawal effects from the medication," Eddie explained. "Or it could be that the stress of the pregnancy has opened up your depression, and it's all pouring out. I know you have a therapist, but do you have a shrink lined up at Duke? I mean, I am so happy to be your psychiatrist, but May, our usual deal of me seeing you once every six months is not going to cut it if you're having these kinds of problems. I want you to have a psychiatrist at Duke who can monitor you as well. Do you want me to call someone for you?"

"Please," I said. "And as soon as possible." I glanced over my shoulder at Logan, who was peering into the mouth of some man who had heard there was _el dentista_ at Rafi Paves's table. Logan had beamed and leapt up from his seat so fast he made the entire table vibrate.

"You're not a dentist yet," I laughed.

"_Yet_," he emphasized, shaking his finger at me as he followed the man over to the bright lights under the bar.

I kept looking at him as I heard myself say, "I don't want Logan to have to be my nursemaid, you know? Because it's one thing to have him be my support during chemo and all, it's another to need him to remind me to get out of bed and stuff. And I know me, I'll get resentful of him having to hover like that, and I can almost smell the fight that I'll have with him. We need to get this under control."

"I'm glad you're being proactive, Mary Anne. It would be very easy to say, 'Oh, it's just baby hormones, oh, it's no biggie,'" Dr. Paves noted, patting my shoulder. "Because it's not, _mija_. You're in a depressive cycle yourself right now. Personally—and Eddie, go ahead and be a bitch and disagree—I don't think you have chronic depression. It's situational; it gets triggered and then lies down on your body like a blanket until the meds give you the strength to shake it off. And this situation you have here, the stress of the cancer and the baby and your dad and just the overall trauma on your life? It's a breeding ground for the depression."

Eddie ran his finger over the rim of his glass. "Well, I don't disagree. I do think that Mary Anne needs constant medication, though. I think her personality lends itself to moping and dwelling—the grudge holding, the excessive crying and mood swings, the extreme shyness and passivity from her childhood? She's got a predilection to depression, Ana, that we have to acknowledge."

"Hi, I'm right here?" I said, waving my hands. "Mary Anne's sitting right here?"

He smiled at me, flicking a bit of his gin in my face. "Thanks, hon, I wasn't aware of that," he snarked. Knotting his hands together, he rested them on the top of his head. "I think you need to see a shrink once every two weeks, and be with your therapist twice a week. This could get out of hand very quickly, you have to stay vigilant."

I covered my face with my hands. "My insurance is good, but it's not that good when it comes to mental health," I sighed. I began rubbing my eyes. "I guess I could just…maybe I should just take out a loan now, use that for tuition and living and stuff, use my trust for health care. I don't want to ask my dad, I don't want him to be involved in this. And I don't want to touch Logan's savings—he said it was my money, but I don't want to use it, not if we don't have to."

Dr. Paves tugged my hands down. "We'll pay," she announced. "As a wedding gift. Eddie and Rafi and I will put down all of your co-pays for any mental health treatment from here on out."

My jaw dropped as I stared at them, bewildered. "Oh, no," I gasped. "You can't do that."

"Why the hell not?" she shot back. "You won't get a present at the big fancy wedding, just as a warning. But we'll do it. We'll have the bills sent to Stoneybrook. You'll be back on your meds after the baby is born, so it's not like this is a forever deal."

"I—it's so generous," I stammered, dropping my hands in my lap. "I don't know what to say."

"Say you'll accept our gift," Eddie urged.

"Let me think it over—talk to him," I said, thumbing back at my husband. "He's the keeper of our bank ledger. I'm sorry, but math just makes my head go gross."

Dr. Paves grinned at me. "Yeah, that's a blow to feminism, right there." She exchanged a look with her brother and said, "So, baby? Babies? Are you okay with the idea of an abortion?"

"Yes and no," I whispered, resting my forehead on my fist. "It's a classic health of the mother situation, isn't it? Twins, with my heart problems? My OB says I'm staring down the barrel of dozens of possible cardiac complications, and when she starts to talk about another heart attack as a real, true thing that could happen? I start to crumble. I can't risk that again. I can't," I said, my face sinking in a sob.

"Of course you can't," Dr. Paves rushed, steeling an arm around my shoulders. "Carrying one baby to term would be hard enough. Two seems nearly impossible. And why risk it, huh? Just do what you said: get the amnio, go from there. Besides—speaking from personal experience," she said in a soft voice, "a lot of times, you miscarry. Your body may say, Nuh uh, can't do it. Your body has a pretty good idea of what it can and cannot handle."

"You've miscarried?" I asked, pressing my thumb under my eye.

"Yes," she answered, giving me a small smile. "It happens. I was pregnant with twins once, and I lost one baby, and then a month later, I lost the other. It was very hard, but that's when I started teaching as well as counseling. It was a good way for me to be maternal without being a mother. And then my idiot brother showed up in Stoneybrook, and I got to be a mother for real, cleaning up after his incompetent self," she grinned.

Eddie tossed a napkin at her head. "Ignore her," he snapped. "Mary Anne, you know this. There is no use waging war against the cancer if you're going to put your health in danger with a pregnancy. Don't feel guilty, don't hate yourself. I know it's confusing since you know you'll have a _baby_ but it isn't just one baby right now."

"But don't mix the confusion in with guilt, got me?" Dr. Paves concluded.

"I got you," I replied. As if it was as simple as that. Though maybe it was. If you say it, if you say it out loud: "I won't feel guilty for doing what I need to do to live."

"Good girl," Eddie said with a nod. He stole a glass of champagne from a waiter passing by. "Now, tell me all about this disaster with your sister and Stacey. It sounds like _The O.C._"

"That show was canceled years ago," I laughed.

"It lives on in DVD!" he barked, slamming his fist on the table. "Don't rob me of the Mischa Barton years, May."

I kept laughing as Logan sat back down at the table. "What's so funny?" he asked.

"Eddie and his rotating cast of imaginary girlfriends," I smiled, wrinkling my nose at my shrink and flicking a bit of my juice at him.

"See, I've had the same imaginary girlfriend for a long time now. Me and Mandy Moore, we're a forever thing," Logan said, linking his index fingers together. "Mary Anne knows, I'll have to leave her if Mandy ever showed up at my door to finally accept the fact that we're totally meant to be."

"Any day now," I told him, rubbing his shoulder. "She'll come to her senses."

Dr. Paves swung her finger between the two of us. "How are you two doing?"

"It's a month on the fifth," Logan beamed. "I have to work full days for the next three weeks, though, so I won't be able to do much of anything for Mary Anne in terms of an anniversary. Sorry, pretty girl. I can get you a new toothbrush, though," he said, perking up.

I rolled my eyes. "Right. Nah, we're going to go to the beach for a couple of days after his internship ends. That's our idea of a honeymoon. Wilmington."

"Sexy," Eddie drawled, rolling his eyes. "Exotic Wilmington."

"But otherwise?" Dr. Paves prompted.

"We're good," I said as he kissed the back of my hand. "_We're_ good. Everything and everyone else is insane."

She grinned at me. "Well, if someone knows insanity, it's you, huh?"

I gaped at her and moved to throw my fork, but a chorus of voices caught my attention. _Besarse, besarse!_ I glanced over at Dr. Paves, and she said, "They want the bride and groom to kiss. _Besar_. To kiss."

"_Un bacio_," Logan told me. "_Posso avere un bacio_?"

"_Si, certamente_," I giggled, kissing him on the lips.

Eddie groaned. "Not you two, Jesus. The extremely drunk Brazilian and Spaniard over there." There was applause, and then the band blasted out a rumbling song, spicy with drums and wailing trumpets. Eddie bolted to his feet. "A samba! Excellent! I'm gonna go find me a pseudo-bridesmaid and samba myself into intoxication."

Dr. Paves stood. "I'm going to go find my husband—I love a good samba. You two coming?"

I shook my head so fast my eyes rattled. She handed me her purse and skittered off with her brother. After she left, I settled into Logan's lap and watched the dancers, Yelena bumbling against her bulbous dress and the build-up of alcohol that turned her arms into mushy lines.

"Isn't she a gorgeous bride?" I sighed. "That dress is four times bigger than her, but she looks so pretty."

"She is very pretty—but what makes her so gorgeous is how happy she is," he replied, twisting his hands over my waist. "I've always thought that Yelena was beautiful, but you just can't take your eyes off of someone that happy, can you?"

"We're going to be that happy," I promised.

He tucked his head against my neck, rocking me in a lazy way, back and forth, like the pendulum of a clock, the clapper of a bell. "We already are," he murmured.

I felt a cough rumble up from the bottom of my lungs, and I struggled to keep it down, but it exploded out of my mouth. I kept hacking for a long minute, and when I pulled my hand away, there was a fine whisper of blood on the lines of my palm. I held it out to him, and he reached over and grabbed a napkin. Without a sound, I wiped my lips as he stared at the blood that smeared over the crook of my hand.

He took his finger and drew a heart in that redness, curling my fingers around it and pulling the fist to his heart. "Three more weeks," he said, knocking my knuckles against the strong ridge of his ribs.

"We'll make it," I sighed, leaning against him again.

If you say it, it might be true.

If you say it, it might be you.


	11. Chapter 10: Logan

**Him**

The girl touched the mask over my face and let out a breath hot with awe. "A vampire," she said, her eyes widening. "_Wow_."

"I know," I nodded. "But only when I have the mask on. So, now you see why I wear it, right?"

She tottered her head back and forth and leaned back, the paper napkin around her chest crinkling. "Are all teeth cleaners vampires?"

I raised an eyebrow at her as I pulled the mask back up. "Only a few of us. The others just want to be cool, you know, so they wear the masks to pretend. Lame, huh?"

"Totally," she agreed. She opened her mouth when I asked, and this time she laid back in quiet as I pressed the metal hook of the probe against her back teeth, running the plaque off of the white blocks. This was easy: cleaning, getting her mouth from something dirtied and uncared and into something right. "You have to make sure you get the brush all the way back, Stephanie. Or else you're teeth are gonna be totally uncool."

She spoke in that gagged, dull way that voices have when something is blocking their tongue. _I do_, I translated.

"No, you don't. See, vampires have ESP, too," I told her, wiping the probe on the napkin.

"I try," she corrected. "It's just boring."

"Well, turn on a song on the radio—do you like to dance?" I asked, and she grinned at me. "Okay, so turn on a song and dance as you brush. Brush for the whole song, and when you're done dancing, you're done brushing. How about that?"

She wrinkled her brow for a moment. "That's okay, I guess. I can do that."

"Excellent." I reached over and turned up the volume on the audio book she had picked—some Lemony Snicket that Mary Anne had said was good. The kids always picked Lemony Snicket. Or Harry Potter. It was predictable, like clockwork. I'd hand them my iPod, they'd choose one of those, and then I'd have a full thirty minutes of peace. Unless they were like Stephanie. Stalling, stalling, anything to stall me.

_What are those metal things called? What does that do? Where does the water go? What's the polisher stuff made of? Why do you wear a mask?_

I'd ease her back and answer her questions as I worked, hoping that the feel of my fingers in her mouth would urge her quiet, but it never lasted. Stephanie wasn't a listener.

Stephanie wasn't like me.

She was lulled, though, by the sound of the words, and it bought me enough time to finish flossing her squinted teeth. In a few years, these teeth would be barricaded with braces, pulling them apart and upright. Mary Anne had encouraged me to do orthodontics. _You love making things right—isn't that more up your alley?_ Maybe. I had a lot of time to think about it. More time now, years where I'd have to wait. But I could wait. I could wait as long as I had to for her. "You're all done," I told Stephanie, scraping one last bit of tartar off of the back of her incisor. "I'm gonna go get Dr. Pompeo, the dentist? And she's gonna check you on over."

"Is this where I get my new toothbrush?" she said as I pressed the button to raise the chair.

"Yup, and floss, too. In fact," I began, reaching over to the cabinets. I pulled out her brush and a box of dental string. "Stephanie, meet Mr. Floss. I want you two to become best friends, okay?"

She giggled, clutching the objects in her fists as I winked at her, pulling off the mask and the gloves and writing in her file. I had two more days here, and then my weeks were done. I would miss this more than I could even understand; my hands ached at the idea of a summer without this job. Every day, I came in and saw patients, I made them right again. As I stood at the counter, filling up the pages of their charts with my notes, I could see them out of the corner of my eye: they would run their teeth over the slick surface of their teeth and smile. Yellowed smile, browned smiles, white smiles, it didn't matter. I had done good, and they thought that _I_ had done good.

For a moment, I believed it, too. For a moment, I could breathe again. I had been waiting for these moments every day since I was fourteen. Since I was told that everything I had thought about myself was wrong. Me, stripped down and broken down and beaten down. This _good_, I needed it like water.

I walked out of the exam room and down to a room across the hall. "Doc? I'm ready for you," I told her, and she gave me an okay sign as she bent down on Rhiannon's patient, pointing out the areas that she had missed on the wisdom teeth. I winced; maybe I should double check Stephanie again. No, triple check at this point.

A vibration against my hip made me startle; I pulled my phone out of my pocket and checked the ID—California, that's all it said. Jeff, maybe? "Hello?" I asked, ducking into the bathroom off of the hall.

"Hey, I'm really sorry to call, but Mary Anne said that if there was an emergency, you were the person to get a hold of," Jeff rushed. "Stacey's in class, and Dawn's off at a coffee shop writing, and Mom can't help, so, I'm really sorry to call you at work, but Mary Anne had said that—"

"Jeff? What do you mean, 'emergency,'" I cut in, pressing my hand to my forehead. "Is she okay?"

"She won't get out of bed, it's like she's, like, asleep with her eyes open? I went in to see if she'd have some lunch, but she's just lying there, curled up on her side and clutching the dog," Jeff explained, his voice so tight, like a hand was clutching at his neck. "She's just staring at the wall, it's like she's drugged or something. She usually will get out bed, you know? She's freaking me out."

"I know, it's okay," I sighed, resting my head against the wall. I stared ahead at the mirror, at the side of my face lit up by the greened light of the phone's display. Part of me in light, the other bitten away into the dark. "I'm coming home, just sit tight."

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"No, no, it's cool. I'm glad you called—thanks, Jeff," I said, snapping the phone shut. Dark again. I didn't have time to do what I wanted: curl up on the floor and cry. Mary Anne, Mary Anne, what was happening to you? Her therapist said that this might happen, that she'd have low days, so low that it would terrify us.

"But then she'll have a really good stretch, so don't get discouraged. You have to go moment to moment," Sarah declared. "And even on those bad days, you have to keep moving, Mary Anne. You have to go on walks, you need to fight that urge to just sleep."

"What do I do? It's really important that I don't, like, hover and tell her what to do," I insisted. "I mean, when she's in bed like that? I shouldn't be the one to get her dressed and make her do stuff, right? Like, that's bad, right?"

Sarah shrugged. "It's not bad, but it's not what she wants."

"It's not what I want," Mary Anne agreed. "I know me. I'll get furious at you for doing it. So what do we do instead?"

"You need to be encouraging and persistent without doing it for her," Sarah told me. "Let's come up with a plan, just in case, okay?" And I pulled out a note card and wrote it all down. Not that I'd forget what to do.

I'd need it to keep me from doing what I wanted to: make it all better for her.

But I can't. You can't make someone better. You can't lay your hands on someone's body and pull the hurt out. You can't hover over them every second because there are too many moments in the day that can't be watched. There's that one second, two seconds, thirty second time where you are gone, and they are now holding the shining edge of a blade in their bathroom. Or they are holding a bottle of pills and counting how many they've collected.

There's no such thing as all better. There's no such thing as _fixing_. As perfect.

All you can do is be there. Give them your love. Give them your time. That's all.

I had to remember that.

I ran to the supervising dentist and told him, _My wife is sick._ They think cancer; they don't know the truth, and I don't tell them. The cancer, it unlocks wells of sympathy that "depression" will not. _My wife has cancer, and she's pregnant, and no matter how much I tell her that it's okay, that she doesn't have to suffer like this, she says she wants to have a baby, and even though it kills me to watch her in pain, I really want a baby, too, I want it to save her, so she's now sick with cancer, pregnant, _and_ depressed. So. Can I go?_

No. _My wife is sick_. Yes.

It takes me ten minutes to get from the clinic to the house; it is at the stoplight at the end of the downtown strip that I notice the blood on the hem of my scrubs. Will she notice? Will she tease me? I hope so.

My Mary Anne does that. This Mary Anne, the Mary Anne that's been here since soon after Yelena's wedding, this Mary Anne is too quiet. The Mary Anne of middle school—no, worse. That girl was loose and unshy in private. Even that girl would look at Mary Anne, this _May_ that she is on the bad days, and say, _You're a mess_.

When I got home, Jeff was sitting on the bottom stair with a tray of food in his hands. "I made her lunch," he said, shaking the tray a little. "I made extra, for you if you want it."

"Oh, thank you, this is great," I said, giving him a smile. "I told Sharon last night that you've been a big help. And, dude, the lawn looks great. What are you doing?"

"Fertilizing," he shrugged. "It's no big."

"Well, thanks—your sister and Stace are so busy, it's been really nice to have you here," I replied, taking the tray from his hands.

Jeff glanced up the stairs. "You think you can get her up?"

"Mary Anne's a fighter," I told him. "She needs to be reminded where the fight is. Trust me, she'll get better once her chemo starts next week. _Tesorina_ does best when she knows exactly where her battles are, and that's why depression is so tough, especially without her meds. There's nothing concrete for her."

Jeff stood up and shifted from foot to foot; his nervousness lifted off of him like steam. "If I ask you something, will you promise not to get mad?"

Narrowing my eyes at him, I replied, "Maybe."

Jeff folded his hands in front of him, and I could tell—he was protecting himself. As if he was expecting me to hit him. I gripped my hands harder on the tray as he asked, "Why are you with her? I mean, of course you won't leave her now, she's pregnant and all, but why are you with her, period? She's got cancer, she's got mental problems, and…Dawn said that her chest? She's got huge scars all over. Keshawn and Todd and the other guys, at practice yesterday, they said that you guys can get any chicks you want. Why her?"

_I thought Mary Anne was gonna be, like, _hot_, man_, Todd had laughed when I brought her to a party, a week after we got together for good. _The way you're always talking about her? I mean, I was expecting something different, like, I don't know, the girl's got no chest, dude. What's up with that?_

I had glared at him, putting down the drink I had in my hand. A minute before, I had been standing out with Mary Anne as she stared out at the lights of the city, listening to the hurt in her voice as she told me about a group of girls that had claimed to be my friends insult her body. Her beautiful body, reduced in a heap by their words. I had come inside to find them, but instead I found this.

I felt my arm leaping back, ready to smash into his face—let's see you hurt. Let's see you bleed like she did. Let's see you in pain in your body and how well you do.

But a hand grabbed my elbow and yanked my fist down. It was the guy who I was backing up that year, the superstar, the god. The guy who still emailed me every week to this day; I had expected him to forget about me once he made it to the NBA, to toss me aside like everyone else does. No: every week for over a year now, _Hey backup, How's it be?_

If he had been here in town, he would have been my best man. He had sent me a blank check when I told him Mary Anne was sick and pregnant, an empty thing with her name on the top and his signature on the bottom and a letter wrapped around it. _I don't want you going to work at camps, I don't want you working as a waiter or whatever shit you were saying in that last email. Whatever you need, it's on me. A loan, not a gift, I know you too well. Just stay with her, take care of her, and we'll work it out after she's all better_.

I put that check in our safety deposit box. I couldn't cash it. It could be an NCAA violation, and I knew that it was too much. I couldn't cash it. Not until I knew what to do.

He had sent me a letter last week, nestled in the nook of a baby blanket with the Seattle Supersonics logo. _That baby better love me best, understand? And why haven't you cashed that check, asshole? My accountant says he's seen nothing. Don't be a stubborn fuck, take the money and do the right thing. Take care of your 'pretty girl' and your baby, don't be so _you_ about it all._

The right thing—that night, he stopped me from punching my teammate. The right thing to do. He had grabbed my shoulder and shoved me back and then glared at Todd. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he shouted. "You're a stupid drunk, and you say stupid things. Not all guys need big ass plastic tits. Don't be ignorant. You could only dream of getting a smart, sweet girl like Lo's got. And you," he snapped, pointing at me. He stepped forward and poked a finger against my heart. "You swallow that shit down. If I ever see you lash out like that again, I'll kick your ass back to Connecticut, understand me? You save it for the court. I don't wanna hear two whispers from you ever, you with me? You save it for the game, you clear?"

"Yes," I said, glancing down at my feet.

And I became so quiet, they called me Ghost all year. Because I was white, and I was quiet, and I followed him around. Following him, following Keshawn, following Coach, follow follow follow.

Put the ball in my hands, and I will lead. I will be so strong, I will take your breath away and make it mine. I will own you. I will destroy you. But. Take it out, and I will follow.

The only person who wanted to hear from me was Mary Anne. The only person who wanted me to walk next to her and not behind.

So I looked at Jeff and tried to figure out a way to tell him. That it's so much more than just the surface of things. That I'm not a man that he should look at the way he does, those eyes of his swimming with envy. The way he tags after me and tries to lap up every move of mine, trying to make them his. Be like me when I play, Jeff, but don't envy me. I'm no one special. I'm not good enough for you to waste your want on.

"She loves me, Jeff," I finally said. "When I'm with her, I actually like myself. I'm enough."

And he frowned at me; he didn't understand. He couldn't. No one could. In moments like this, I could swear that I felt the wood in my body again, the splinters of plywood that had lodged in my leg and sent a current of pain through my whole body and swam in my blood for days. I had earned that, I did, I deserved that, I did.

Why wouldn't it ever leave? Unless I was with her.

I took the tray up to our room and put it on the bench at the foot of the bed. J.D. lifted her head and looked at me as I came over to where Mary Anne was laying, to where she was looking, dead center on the wall. "Hey there, pretty girl," I whispered, stroking her face. She blinked, tightening her arm around the dog. "How are you feeling?"

She blinked again, rolling her eyes down. Her mouth deepened in a pucker, but she didn't speak. I kept rubbing her face though until her skin warmed. Once, Mary Anne had complained of being on fire, feeling fire too much in her body. But now, she was always cold. After a few minutes, she sighed. "I'm tired, Logan."

"I know you are," I whispered, kissing her forehead. "But Jeff made lunch, I thought maybe we could eat? And then take J.D. for a W-A-L-K," I spelled, glancing down at the dog who knew that magic word too well for me to say it. "When we get back, I'll let you pick a movie. Anything but that one with the girl who looks like you and Julie Andrews and the princess stuff."

"I don't look like Anne Hathaway," she protested, pulling J.D. closer. "You're so silly."

"Yeah, well, come make something of it," I grinned, wagging my fingers towards my chest. A challenge. But she gave me a tea-weak smile and stayed there on the bed. "What's keeping you in bed?"

"My body feels like steel," she said, her mouth slumping. "It feels like I have iron for bones. And my head, it's just…tired, I guess."

"Do you want help getting up?" I asked. "You can use me as a lever."

Mary Anne nodded, and I nudged J.D. out of the way, so that I could offer my wife my hands. I wouldn't lift her up myself, I wouldn't carry her out. I could only help her do it herself. She held hard to my hands, gripping herself into a sitting position. Swinging her legs over the bed, she grimaced in effort and then wiped her face with her hands, letting out a large yawn.

I looked at the clock; two in the afternoon. She had been sleeping for sixteen hours. This was a bad day, a very bad day. They kept saying, it would get better starting next week. The depression would get better as the first trimester hormones leveled out. That these last weeks were the worst. She would feel less rocked, less tired. More like herself.

"Let's go on the…thing with J.D. first. Will you get me some clothes?" she asked, tugging on the shirt she was wearing. A shirt of mine; she hated my school, but she sure loved my t-shirts. She looked so lovely in that color blue, but it was her body in red that always stopped me and slunk me into a speechless state.

"No," I said, sitting next to her. "Remember what Sarah said? You need to do these things yourself, Mary Anne."

She sighed. "Okay." She got up, lurching over to the dresser. I watched her hand float over her stomach, rubbing it like brass. When she dropped the shirt to the floor, pulled her panties off, I had to remind myself not to be _me_. To not give into the urge to crawl across the bed and grab her hips and pull her to me.

We had lain together once years ago, our breath calming down from pants to deep, slow inhales, and she traced hearts over my chest. "For you? Sex is love," she announced, tapping her finger on my sternum. "For me, it's a connection."

"Thank you, Psych Girl," I grinned, pulling my hand behind my head.

She swatted at my arm and danced her head back and forth, the bald gleam of her scalp catching in the pale moonlight. "No, no, I thought this one out."

"Like, during? Damn, I'm impressed. It's hard enough to remind myself to breathe when I'm with you," I said, reaching up to kiss her neck. And I whispered into her skin, "When I'm inside of you."

She sighed in a heavy way, a low way, putting a hand on the back of my head. "I'm trying to make a point," she said in a thin whine.

"Then make it," I shrugged, still kissing, still touching.

"Okay, well, you won't have sex with someone unless you love them, and I think that this is more than teenage guy hormones—I think you use sex and things like it to show me how much you love me. And I use it because it makes me feel close to you, and I love being close to you. And it makes me feel…whole," she added, and I saw her reach her hand up to her head. "It's a connection with something that I don't get otherwise. You make me feel whole."

And she tipped her head so her lips could meet mine, and she whispered in my mouth, "I feel whole when you're inside me."

We could go long stretches without each other; weeks at a time where I was so busy, so pained from games that she would come to my dorm and just lay with me in silence and rub my back. Her thumbs would needle into the sore places by my spine, and then she would roll me over and lie on my chest, not asking for more. We wanted more, but not then. It was enough to just be together.

So I watched her stand naked in front of the dresser and kept my hands in my lap. We were together, she was up and moving, this was enough. But she caught my eye and grinned. She knew. She wanted it, too. But she pulled on a clean shirt of her own and a pair of her yoga pants and held out her arms. "Better?" she asked.

"Getting there," I nodded. I looked down at the dog. "You want a walk, J.D?"

The dog snapped her mouth and ran in a crazy circle over the mussed sheets, leaping to the floor and barking at Mary Anne's ankles. Mary Anne smiled at her and then at me before bending back in a massive yawn. Her fingers curled like smoke.

We walked for a long time in silence, hands in a knot as J.D. yanked us in squares, around block after block in our neighborhood. I held the leash, not Mary Anne; I was scared that the small dog would knock her off her feet. Her heavy, thudding feet, still leadened. By the time we got home, though, she seemed quicker, more centered.

More like Mary Anne.

"Will you get the food from upstairs? I'll pick a movie," she suggested, walking over to the shelves with the DVDs. "Or did Sarah say that I have to do everything around here."

"Oh, pity poor Cinderella," I clucked. "It's so hard to be you."

"I know," she sighed, shaking her head. "You're just worthless, angel. With the whole buying me flowers every week and the doing the laundry. Just pathetic, I mean, can't you carry your own weight? That's a lot of weight," she glared.

"You saying I'm fat? Girl, you better be glad I got a body like glass, that I didn't do football," I grinned. "I'd be as big as Sandy's boyfriend, you'd be crushed every night."

"Ew," she shivered. "Thank God you're so fragile. You woudda had your knees ripped open by the end of junior year had you done football. You'd be like Howie or Robert Brewster or RJ Blaser, just a poor, writhing mess."

I shuddered as I walked up the stairs. That used to be my worst nightmare, that I'd shred my knees and never play again. Ruined, like those guys. Ruined without a way to avoid it. But there were worse things that could happen. Worse ways to be ruined.

When I came back downstairs, she was sitting on the couch, and she made a surprised noise when I buried my head in her lap. "What is it, angel? Are you okay?"

"I just—I just love you," I murmured, belting her waist and kissing her belly. Two kisses, one for each baby. Baby, baby, make her a match. Please. She wants you so much, I want her so much, please.

She laid her head on mine and rubbed my neck. "I love you, too, Logan." And in the silence of a second, she read me like a book, like the best book she had ever looked at. "Oh, husband. No dying, I promise."

She promised. Could she? I was taking her at her word, like I always did. And I couldn't help it: that moment in the bathroom, it came back, and I began crying into her skin, covering her in a pain that she didn't need. She had enough pain to last her past the end of time, but I had to give her mine, too.

"No dying," I cried, rubbing my face against her stomach. "I can't—I don't know what I'd do if you died."

"Then I won't," she whispered. She promised.

She lied.


	12. Chapter 11: Mary Anne

**Second**

An explosion of sound rocked me out of sleep. A voice tumbling over an old rock song screaming out with messy guitars. I popped upright, rubbing my eyes. I fumbled for my glasses, glancing at the clock. Quarter to eleven.

And I still didn't want to get out of bed.

I forced myself to roll over the empty right side of the bed, letting my hands drift over the gardenias laying there in place of a body. The rich, curling scent wrapped onto my fingers, and I scooped them in my hands as I stumbled out of the room, quickly tossing on a pair of his crumpled boxers and a tank top, and scurried down the stairs and into the living room.

No Jeff. I shrugged; he had been on his best behavior lately, tagging after my husband to every pick-up game and workout, spending a lot of time with Dawn, and just generally acting like a human being and not a surly ball of resentment. For a moment, I actually missed him. I shook that off and kept walking into the kitchen then down the steps to the basement, the root of the music.

I edged around the door of the bomb shelter and saw Stacey twisting herself down on her ankles before snaking back up, her arms stretching to the ceiling. When she turned, she saw me and grinned, luring me forward with a roll of her finger.

"It's all right now," she sang, pressing her hands down the curve of her body, hooking her thumbs in the waistband of her low cut shorts and whispering them under her pelvic bones, showing off the small lump of her insulin pump. "Baby, it's-a all right now."

"What's this?" I shouted.

"The Stanford fight song, May," she called back, closing her eyes and shaking her chest, making her hair scream around her face. "Pep bands are for chumps—we got ourselves the Leland rock and rollers, doncha know?"

I didn't. I watched her loop her body around and around, a hypnotic swirl of browned skin and smooth lines. She let her mouth hang open, shoving out her lower lip and puckering up as if she were kissing the vibrating air. She jiggled up to me, seizing my hands and making me swing in time with her.

"You're becoming quite the dancer," Stacey giggled. "I'm so glad we dragged you out last night. You did very well with your hip shaking."

"Well, by the time I'm actually 'good,' I'll lose my center of balance," I sighed, rubbing my mounding belly. Stacey laughed, reaching over and shutting off the stereo. "How was yoga this morning?"

"Excellent," she nodded. "It was a combination of jocks, old biddies, and a bunch of people who had, like, their work clothes hung in their lockers—I'm sorry, but when I'm a bigwig, I am not kicking my ass to do seven AM yoga before a huge day in the office. Oh, and God, I had no idea that Logan was that flexible—well, I bet you did," she amended, biting down on her tongue.

I swatted at her arm. "Oh, stop. He started doing it during his shoulder rehab? He says it's increased his wingspan, whatever that is."

Stacey flopped down on the air mattress. "May, your whole 'sports ignorance' thing is growing old. Wingspan is how far you can stretch your arms. Seriously, sport is like a soap opera, right, but instead of dialogue, you have action. Can the team make the first down, can Stanford make it to the Big Dance? Drama, drama, drama—and all in hot bodies. Why can't you think of it like that?"

I screwed up my mouth in thought. "Well, maybe."

"I'll make you a football fan for reals—you gotta love a sport that has a position called the 'tight end,'" she announced. She pointed up on the wall. "Do you not love that poster?"

Glancing at the huge face of Audrey Hepburn, I nodded. "Well, in three weeks, you've transformed this place from a creepy bomb shelter into a creepy bomb shelter that is very Stacey," I declared. I leaned against the doorjamb and sighed. "Stacey, will you just move back upstairs? This is driving everybody crazy, you and Dawn not speaking. It's been almost a month. I mean, you're always down here or out of the house—and honestly? It's freaking me out. I keep thinking that you'll hit a bar, and I'll get a phone call that you're in the hospital," I admitted.

"May," Stacey sighed. "First, Dawn and I are not going to be good for a long time—she knows how bad she hurt me," Stacey said, her tongue loaded like a gun. "Second, other than that first night? I haven't tried to get wasted. Back home, _these_ are all the ID I need," she noted, squeezing her chest. "But here? Y'all are bitches with the whole 'you must be this old to drink' Nazi routine. And Sarah told me something that first Monday that I think is right—no matter how angry I am at Dawn, it's not worth hurting myself."

"Sarah's real good, isn't she?" I grinned.

"She is—and speaking of therapy…you're not doing too well, are you?" Stacey asked, standing back up. "I've been watching you for a while now, and I'm getting nervous. You sleep all the time, you're always just reading or working. Are you okay?"

My mind drifted over the last journal I had read the night before, tracing that memory like Braille. _I was with my children at the mall, and there was a circus right in the middle of the building, elephants and everything. And I saw that my son was going to be eaten by the lions, but I didn't move. I just thought, better he be killed that way than by me._ I woke up last night in a sweat-cloaked daze, fumbling for the light and keeping it on all night, shining it all away.

It was bearing down on me, the low swing of my depression. I was doing everything that Sarah suggested, going on long walks in the morning with J.D., repeating it in the evening with Logan, his hand almost too tight with mine. I moved as much as I could during the day, trying to shake off the heavy hand of this depression pushing me down, pushing me into my bed. Dawn would sit in my room with me in the afternoon, urging me to knit or read or do anything that wasn't sleep. That wasn't staring at the ceiling until the white of it blurred over my eyes. When Dawn was gone at night, seeing her not-a-boyfriend Henry, Jeff and Logan dragged me to the living room, just to be with other people.

Because if I had my way, I'd stay upstairs. Alone. How I was meant to be.

That's how bad it was—even my stepbrother was worried enough to talk to me.

"I'm okay," I shrugged. "I'm getting through it. This is just a hard time—I mean, I start treatment on Monday, thank God. And Logan's working so hard because his internship ends, like, tomorrow? And he's still got six more clinical hours to cram in. Hey, he's gonna do your teeth today, right?" I brightened.

Stacey slapped her hands over her mouth. "I'm terrified," she giggled. "Me, then Jeff today, and he mentioned that Dawn's going in tomorrow. I hope he shreds her gums."

"Stacey," I warned. I narrowed my eyes. "Where _is_ Jeff?"

"He, um, borrowed your car," Stacey said, wincing. "He wanted to go to the mall and get some fly threads to impress young Katharine Louisa Bruno."

I slapped my forehead. "Oh, this is going to be bad," I moaned. "I mean, Kerry's a thresher when it comes to guys. Logan's half convinced that she's a lesbian, she just will not date."

"Or maybe what happened to her in eighth grade really scared her," Stacey replied, looking at her fists. She knocked them against her hips and gave me a weak smile. "It's amazing how a bad sexual experience can knock the crap out of you."

I took in a deep breath. "Dawn told me—that you haven't slept with anyone since you got to Stanford."

Stacey rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well. I set a goal—I wasn't going to just screw anymore. A guy had to make it past ten dates. And no one did. And then, it reached this point where I just…I don't know. Guys disappoint you all the time, they never give you what you want."

"What do you want, Stacey?" I whispered, taking a step closer to her.

"I don't know. But I'm not finding it," she sighed. I heard the door slam upstairs, and Stacey froze.

"Hello? Mary Anne?" a male voice called out. Jeff? I raised my eyebrows at Stacey and headed upstairs. She and I walked into the living room where we met Jeremy and Jeff, both looking up the stairs.

"Hey, guys," I said, walking over to Jeremy and kissing his cheek. "What are you doing here?"

"I need to talk to you," he said in a low voice, and I blinked, following him out of the living room and into the back yard. "I ran into your brother outside—he's cute."

"He's straight jail bait," I giggled, sitting down at the small picnic table that the previous tenants left behind. "How are you? How was Atlanta? Is Aaron good?"

Jeremy laughed. "He's working insane hours—investment banking is so not my deal. I mean, you have to wear a suit, you have to go to work at the crack of dawn, and you're stressed out the entire time."

"No, thanks," I shuddered. "Though, I guess the big money can help you sleep at night."

"Yeah, all two hours of sleep," he smiled. He reached across the table and took my hands. "May, I gotta tell you something that you're not going to want to hear."

I pushed my glassed up my nose and stared at him. "What is it?" I swallowed.

"Dr. Montalbano caught me this morning and asked how you were doing. He said that you're doing great work," Jeremy reassured me, "but that you look really tired and kinda empty. And with your chemo starting next week…well, they're discussing whether or not you should continue on the project right now. Maybe you need to rest."

"What!" I screamed, tossing his hands aside. "I'm doing the work, I'm doing it great, how can they do this to me?"

"They're only discussing it—and May, everyone's getting worried. Erin says that when she comes over? You basically just sit there like someone's yanked your plug out of the wall. I mean, honey, you work with psychologists and shrinks—they all know that pregnancy means no meds, and you've always been so candid about being on drugs. It doesn't take a Duke degree for everyone to put two and two together and come up with depression," Jeremy sighed.

"It's just withdrawal," I whimpered, pulling up my legs. "It's just first trimester hormones. I'll level out next week, I mean, I'm in week thirteen as of tomorrow. You have to fight for me, Jerry. I can't lose this."

He sighed, his entire body lifting up and then sagging back down. "On one hand? I know that this is so important to you. But on the other, look at you. You're on the verge of tears. The May I know isn't like this. All we want to do is see you through this cancer, okay, and I'm scared that you're overdoing it. I don't want to lose you, you're my Charlotte," he said, drifting his hand to my curls. "The project will still be there—it's a two year study, May. And we'll be crunching the data well until you and me get our master's degrees, right?"

I began sobbing into the hem of my shirt, and Jeremy kept stroking my hair. "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry. But we all want you to live so much. And we want you to be you." His tongue clicked, and Jeremy added, "And to be honest? I'm scared these journals are getting to you."

My head snapped up, and I stared at him, my tongue struck down by those words. "What?" I breathed.

"The stuff in the journals. People who are pretty damn nuts. I think you're carrying them with you because it reminds you of high school," Jeremy explained. "I didn't tell Dr. M, but I'm right, aren't I?"

"I'm dreaming about my mom again," I told him. "We're getting ready for the baby. Babies."

He held hard to my head. "Mary Anne, as your friend? I am asking you to take a leave of absence from the project. Please. You're fighting cancer, you're a tiny lady with two very needy things that are rocking your body and not in the sexy Justin Timberlake way. And you're fighting the change in your body chemistry. You are vulnerable to go down in a big way, and I can't let you add to your stress by keeping up this work."

I choked a little on my tears as I protested, "I won't get into a good PhD program without something like this, Jerry."

"You're being so _stupid_, I can't even comprehend," he snapped. "You'll get in anywhere you want, just shut up. Don't make me bitch-slap you with your own resume."

I ducked my head down again and wiped my eyes. Jeff walked outside and sat down next to me. "Are you okay?"

"Aren't you the asshole brother?" Jeremy said, narrowing his eyes.

Jeff sighed. "I've been on my best behavior for three weeks, haven't I, Mary Anne? I mean, Mom asked me to be good to Mary Anne. And Logan said I couldn't come with him to basketball stuff if he heard one negative word out of my mouth."

"Oh, so it's not because you like Mary Anne," Jeremy sneered. "Classy, Jeff."

Placing his hands flat on the table, Jeff replied, "Well, I don't want Mary Anne to be sad like this. She's sad." He licked his lips. "Mom said that if Dawn and I think that Mary Anne isn't doing better, she'll come down here to stay. And I don't want my mother to have to disrupt her life like that, you know? So, I'm doing the nice guy thing for my mom, can that just be enough for you?"

No. But I'd take a friendly Jeff over what he had been any day, no matter why. I shot Jeremy a pleading look, and he rolled his eyes. "Whatever, I guess. But I'm with Logan—we'll have you on the first plane back to the O.C. if you make this any worse for her."

"Why is it so bad right now, Mary Anne?" Jeff asked, putting his hand on my shoulder. "I mean, you've got a lot of great people who are here for you. Why can't you just shake it off, you know? Are you just scared about, like, the cancer and stuff?"

I looked at Jeremy and shut my eyes tight. As if depression was like a surprise rain, a wetness that can be dried away, evaporated away into the air with an ease. "I'm not scared, Jeff. I know I'll beat it. I know it."

I had to say that. If you say it, it might be true.

If you say it, it might be you.

Jeff helped me back to my feet, and I put my arm around Jeremy's waist. "I'll go in tomorrow and beg off the research," I agreed. "Will you come with me?"

"Of course," he assured me, rubbing the side of my arm. "Do you want me to come with to your OB appointment today?"

I shook my head. "It's a sister bonding moment. Me, Dawn, and Kerry. It should be a real kick in the pants." I glanced at Jeff. "You really want to come with to the airport?"

His head bobbled. "Oh, yeah."

"She's your best friend's ex, and you used to hook up with _her_ best friend," I noted. "Are Jordan and Haley cool with that?"

"Was Randa cool with you snatching up _her_ ex?" Jeff shot back. "Come on, Mary Anne, don't be so high school."

"Ouch," Jeremy laughed. "That's a dagger right to the spleen."

Stacey was puttering around the kitchen, now in jeans. "I'm off to get my teeth did," she announced. "Then, I'm off to the library, then I have a dinner with the grad students."

"How come you are cool with your prof, but you can't be chill with Dawn?" Jeff demanded, crossing his arms over his chest. "Dawn misses you so much, it's retarded."

"Because he didn't know any better. She did," Stacey said, giving him a cold look. "And Dawn knows she deserves this. If she wants to be my friend again, she knows she's gotta give me a shit load of space to work this out. If I can," she remarked, slinging her purse over her shoulder. "Alright. I'll see you…soon. This weekend, I'm kinda gonna be busy—I've got that big project to work on with Nan."

"Are you going to go to Kerry's meet at all?" I asked.

Stacey tapped her lip with her fingers. "I can maybe do tomorrow evening. We'll see." She walked out the back door, wiggling her hand at us before disappearing behind the gate.

Jeff sighed. "She's holding a grudge harder than you usually do, Mary Anne."

"Thanks, Jeff," I dulled, wiping my face with my hands. I looked down and yelped, seeing my ragged outfit. "I've gotta go get cleaned up—I don't want Kerry thinking that I'm some slob."

"No, just that you never get out of bed unless we drag out you," he mumbled. His face softened as he reached out and brushed under my eyes. "You slept forever, and you still look tired."

Jeremy squeezed my hip. "You do, hon. Maybe you shouldn't overdo it today. Get Kerry, go to the doctor, then take a nice long walk and go to bed."

"No," Jeff protested. "We're going to watch the pick-up game. Right, Mary Anne?"

I glanced at Jeremy, and he laughed. "Oh, Jeff, Mary Anne hates watching Logan play. You'll probably be on your own there."

"Alone with Kerry," Jeff mused. "Maybe that's not too bad."

I rolled my eyes and gave Jeremy a long hug before retreating back upstairs. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I startled. My face was pale, red by my hairline where I kept feeling a scaly itch. Instead of eyes, I had dull copper circles that peered over a blue-black half moon of dark, lining my eyes like bruises.

I reached out and touched my reflection. Where have you gone, Mary Anne? Where did you go, leaving this tired shell behind?

Following the process that Stacey had taught me, I covered up the circles with my make-up, adding blush in a whisper all over my face. I put in a little mascara and lipstick and looked back up at myself. At someone who looked like me again. Better, better. I couldn't wear this much make-up usually—it got kissed and touched away—but I needed it today.

When I came back down the stairs, Jeff nodded at me. "Much better."

"Really?" I asked, smoothing down my dress.

"You look normal," Jeff reassured me, reaching over to tuck a curl behind my ear. His touch was so light, and I caught a whiff of his cologne, a woody spice that climbed off of his body.

I grinned. "That's a bit strong, there, Jeff."

"It's manly," he defended, snapping his collar into place.

Rolling my eyes, I led us out of the house and to my car. We drove in silence, but not a bleak one, just two people who don't have much to say and choose not to fill the air with words that are heliumed with tension. I glanced over at him, though, and as we pulled onto the interstate, I asked, "Are we better, Jeff?"

His face folded in thought. "You're really hard to live with, Mary Anne," he admitted. "You don't know what it's like to have Richard look and me and Dawn and see inferior kids. 'Cause you're so nice and smart and good. And even Mom does it, you know? 'Oh, Mary Anne got straight As, _again_, and at Duke! That's practically Ivy League!'" he gushed in a too-high voice. "'Mary Anne planned a breast cancer fundraiser. Mary Anne was published in another academic journal. Mary Anne, Mary Anne, Mary Anne never messes up, does she?'" He paused and sighed. "'Why can't you be more like Mary Anne?'"

"I'm not perfect," I mumbled, tightening my hands on the wheel.

"Yeah, well, even when you mess up, nobody can bring that up, can they? You have cancer. You could die. You can't be mean to a dying girl, can you? Me and Dawn, we can never win. Especially me, because at least Dawn's smart and, what is that, charismatic?—and everybody still loves her for all of that stuff she did after Vista. She's Peace Photo Girl. I'm just Jeff, and I'm not like Logan. Logan's smart and super good. I'm thick as shit and just kinda good. You don't know what it's like to be Mary Anne's stepbrother," he rushed, knocking his head against the window.

Those words pulled my tongue right out, scraping off anything that I could think to say. I just breathed, then, staring at the racing scenery, the pine trees that rose up from the scrubby ground. Everything was blurring by, nothing was clear in the sides of my eyes. Jeff blended with the trees and the cars chasing us down the freeway.

"I'm sorry," I sighed, turning off to the airport exit. "I used to think that Sharon didn't like me as much as Dawn; I still sometimes feel like she's only as good as she is to me because I _am_ sick. I'm not perfect, I screw up all the time. Just ask my husband, you know? He knows all of my crap, he'll be happy to tell you how I get snappish and petty. Just as your sister."

"I do. But Dawn never calls you out on it right—she gets too angry, and it comes out like it did a couple weeks ago. We can't ever be right around you, Mary Anne. It gets exhausting," he shrugged. His eyes slid over to me, though, and he shifted his body to face me. "And, honestly? These past few weeks, seeing you this sad and worn out? It's, like, I feel guilty for resenting you. I can't even get to be angry at you because you're not well, and, like, no matter how shitty you make me feel, I see you looking worse, and it's not very fair."

"What do I say now, Jeff?" I replied.

"You don't," he murmured, turning back from me again.

The quiet settled back down, lasting until Kerry came bounding from her concourse and past the security check, flinging down her bag to swing into my arms. A man trailed behind her, young and tall, his arm bound with ropey muscles and a shirt that had the same logo as Kerry's: _Stamford Aquatic Club_.

"This is my coach, Pierce," Kerry beamed, tugging him over. She looked at him and whined, "Are you sure you don't want to have dinner tonight?"

"I'm meeting up with my old club, Bruno," he said, patting her head. "You know, you're welcome to eat with _us_, if you want."

She wrapped her arms around me again and hugged me close. "Nuh uh, I want to spend it with my family." She turned back to him and held up her palms for him to slap; their skin made a loud crack as they gave each other a series of exuberant high fives.

"Eat light tonight," he instructed. "Go to bed real early, do your motivations, and I'll see you at noon. And remember—winners?"

"Are made, not born—go strong," she barked, slamming her fist against his. He tossed us a wave before heading down to the baggage claim on his own. Kerry grinned at me again, and then narrowed her eyes at Jeff. "You're the Jeff."

"Yes, I am," he smoothed, holding out a hand to her.

Kerry shifted her bag back onto her shoulder. "Logan says you're mean to Mary Anne. And you're total BFF with Jordan Pike, and he's a dick. You can bite me." She grabbed my hand and tugged me to the escalators while Jeff blinked in a rapid beat at our bodies. I waved him over to us as Kerry began chattering about her flight, her meet, the houses her parents were looking at in Louisville, Angelina Jolie's new baby, on and on and not stopping, not until we were back on the freeway.

Jeff leaned forward from the back seat. "I'm not mean to Mary Anne, and it's not like you're so perfect with your siblings. Jordan and Adam said they've seen you yelling at your brothers all the time."

Kerry wove her hands through the thick gold of her mane. "Yeah, but I love my brothers, as stupid as they are sometimes. You don't love Mary Anne. That, Jeff Schafer, is what we like to call 'the difference.'" She looked at me with a smirk planted on her face. "Don't you agree, Mary Anne?"

"I am staying out of this," I announced, changing lanes. "Jeff and I had a discussion about our relationship, and I'm not going to go complicating it any further. And you, Miss _Alladolla_, you do not need to get your butt in the middle of it."

"Dad says that I'm a doer, not a watcher, and doers make the world move," Kerry sniffed, picking her nails. "Lo's a watcher, I'm a doer. Hunt's…well, he's whatever is in the middle."

"Logan's a doer when he needs to be. He just doesn't see the need to be aggressive all the time, Kay," I protested, laying a hand on her leg.

"You are so cute when you defend him," she laughed. "It's, like, you just love my brother so much, you ignore the fact that's he's kinda a dork."

Jeff snorted. "Mary Anne's a dork, too, Kerry. She has a book of vocabulary in the bathroom. Like, hi, I want to take a crap and learn about, like, defencestrate."

I bit my lip, holding back the urge to correct him. De_fen_estrate. To throw something out a window.

Words, words: how much we hold in them.

"So, you're really good, huh?" Jeff prompted, touching Kerry's shoulder.

"Yes," she said, shifting away. "I'm not the best, though, I'm not even within the cut for the world team. Not yet. I'm gonna join a club in Louisville that's better than my current club, but I'll really get my game on in college." Kerry let out a whining breath through her nose and looked at me. "What do I do, Mary Anne? Go to Auburn on a partial ride or get full money from someplace at home?"

"Just go on visits, Kerry—that's how I found Duke. I came to a conference here, and I just fell in love. You'll know," I told her.

"I'm hoping to get a full ride to Santa Clara," Jeff piped up. "For basketball. It's in California."

"I'm not learning impaired," Kerry snapped. "I know Santa Clara. WCC. Loses to Gonzaga like it's been predetermined by God. Catholic Jesuit, stupid mascot, cute colors. And it's just north of the Salinas Valley, where, Mary Anne?" she prompted.

"Where Steinbeck set _East of Eden_," I grinned. "That one I know. Do colors matter?"

"Yes," Jeff said. "Stacey says that orange would be terrible on me. So, I guess I would have to say no to Auburn."

Kerry laughed, looking back at him. "That's too funny." I saw Jeff lean against his seat with a smile on his face. Jeff, one.

Kerry, five. Sorry, stepbrother, you're not doing too well.

I turned on the stereo, and we listened to my Regina Spektor CD until we reached Chapel Hill; I pulled up to the student health building so that Jeff could go into the dental clinic. "We'll meet you at the game, right?" Jeff asked, tapping me on the shoulder.

"Maybe—Kerry'll be there," I said, glancing at her as she nodded. "Either I'll come, or I'll just drop her off. We'll see."

Jeff gave her a wink, and I watched her nose curl up as the two of us drove away. "He's lecherous," she scoffed, twisting her hair into a braid. "I feel like he's trying to see me naked. Gross."

"Well, the bathing suit doesn't leave much up to the imagination," I teased, and she slapped my arm.

"Where are the good guys?" she moaned, shaking her hair. "Seriously. They either want to get in your pants, or they're totally weak. Where is my good guy, Mary Anne? I've gone to all three Homecomings stag, I went to my prom alone, and in the Lou, I'll probably do it again. Guys are total wash-outs. Dad says I'll meet a good, strong guy in the Air Force, but, hi, that's five years from now. I just want a date, Mary Anne, where I'm not trying to stab myself with a fork by the time the check comes."

I sighed, pulling us to a stop at a red light. "Oh, Kerry, I don't know. They're out there, I promise." I bumbled my lips around what I wanted to say, finally spitting out, "Maybe you come on a bit strong, Kay. Like, perhaps you should relax a bit more? You snapped Jeff's head off about ten times in the course of twenty minutes. He thinks you're totally hot—you might find him to be a jerk, but if you don't lay off a smidge, how will you know?"

"First impressions say the most," Kerry announced, wrapping an elastic band around the nub of her braid. "And his said, 'I'm a hormone with legs.'"

"All guys at that age are hormones with legs, even your brother—he still is," I laughed. " Just some guys cover it up a bit better. Are able to multitask."

Kerry folded up her legs under her body and let her eyes linger over me. "So. When you were my age, you were already sleeping with him."

"Yeah," I admitted as I accelerated. My foot hit the gas a bit too hard, and I braked in a rush to slow us down. "Though, I mean, by the summer before senior year, we hadn't really, like, done it a lot. I was really sick for a long stretch there." Senior year, though, that was different, but I didn't want to dig into that hole. Not yet, not with her.

"Are you glad that you did?" she asked, rubbing her face.

I stole a look at her. "I am, Kerry. I wanted to. I know you don't, but we're all different people. Which is why the whole judging thing of yours? Really isn't fair."

"You've been hanging out too much with my brother," she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest. She looked ahead out of the windshield for a while. She coughed, and I felt a need to cough, too, bending over the wheel and hacking for a long minute, heaving and finally grabbing a Kleenex from my purse so I could spit.

When I looked at the tissue, there was blood again.

"Holy God, Mary Anne, we gotta get you to a doctor," Kerry gasped, looking at the Kleenex.

"No, Kerry, we knew this was back," I sighed, crumbling it up and tossing it into a grocery bag full of trash under my legs. "I start chemo and stuff on Monday, we're gonna treat it for two weeks, then see if it doesn't shrink enough so that we can avoid invasive surgery. Like, we want to not have me under general anesthesia. It's okay, don't worry," I told her, tugging on her braid.

Kerry took in a deep breath and ducked her head. "If I tell you something, will you, like, first, not freak, and second, not tell Logan?"

"Yes to the first, maybe to the second," I replied, parking the car in the Duke student health lot.

She unbuckled her seatbelt and turned to face me, holding my hands in her own. Her hands, her body, her face—she looked so much like her brother, it was eerie. She had the same strong shape of her face, the lines of her jaw sloping down to a small, squared off chin. When she smiled, a crooked thing that jutted so high up her left cheek. that same dimple flickered in her right cheek. And when she was serious, those same sharp topaz blue eyes widened and glinted. Like stone. I tugged one hand back and wrapped my fingers over my necklace and watched her flutter around in her seat.

"Mom and Dad have been talking," she began. "They totally believe in you beating cancer again, okay? But they're prepping for the worst. And…if you die, they're gonna insist that Logan transfers to Louisville. Take a year off—which is perfect, since he'd have to sit a year before playing again, right? Take the year to heal and let them take care of him. And if there's a baby, they can help him out with it." Kerry's hands felt so cold as she sighed, "They're scared that he'd kill himself. Because of Mom, how she was. I told them that he would never do that, not after all we did to keep her right, you know? But Mom said that if Dad had ever been killed when he was overseas, she would have done it, and no one could have stopped her, so they're really terrified."

I swallowed, pulling her hands up to my flat chest, over my heart. "I'm scared, too. I mentioned it to him, just once, and he said that if there was a baby, he wouldn't. So that's why I have to have a baby," I murmured, drifting my hand down to my stomach. "It can save me, it _will_ save him."

"Do you want it?" Kerry asked.

"Yes," I said. "I want it as much as I want to live. But I need it for him. It's gonna change absolutely everything that we had planned, that he had planned, but this is what he needs to keep going, just in case. He's not like my dad," I said, my breath catching. "Having a baby without my mother there broke my father. He's not my dad, I know he's not." I licked my lips and cried, "My dad still won't talk to me."

Kerry put her arms around me and let me cry into her chest. "You have your stepmom, though, and you have my family. We're your family. My dad really wants you to call him Dad, you know. Mom told him not to say it, and she'd never ask you to call her Mom, but they are, you know. They're not perfect, they screw up a lot, especially with Logan, but they're really awesome under it all. We're here for you."

"I know," I sniffed. I pulled back and wiped at my eyes. "God, I am so tired of crying."

"I never cry," Kerry shrugged. "Well, I do sometimes, but not often. I'd rather scream at the top of my lungs when I hurt. My favorite way to deal is to go all the way on up to the top of the diving platform and scream and then jump. Not dive, but just run and fling on out there into the air. For a few moments, you feel totally weightless. It's incredible," Kerry breathed, running a hand through my curls. "I've always wanted curly hair."

"I got a perm," I laughed, blowing my nose. "I wanted _Felicity_ hair. I permed it in high school, and then when my hair got long enough? I permed it freshman year—it just stayed this way somehow."

No: because of Barbara.

Barbara, I need you. Barbara, where are you? It's been long enough, long enough with Amelia. Come back, come back.

I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, wiping away the smudges of make-up and drying my eyes. I smiled at Kerry and got out of the car. We walked on up to the building where Dawn and Dr. Collins—Henry, he insisted that I call him _Henry_—were waiting, cups of coffee in their hands as they sat on the bench next to the door.

"I just wanted to say hi," he grinned, standing up as I approached.

"Hey," I replied. "I'm sorry I punked on dinner. I just wasn't feeling well." That was close enough to the truth; unlike last night, where Stacey and Erin bullied me into going out, I just couldn't get out of bed a few nights ago to meet Dawn and Henry. There was something pushing me down all day, pushing me into sleep.

"How about…Saturday? Lunch?" he offered. "My treat."

Dawn laughed, giving him a little shove. "Hello, you're the only one with a real paycheck, you have to pay." She looked at me, her eyes shining. "We used the day off to go to the art museum. Damn, does your school have a nice collection."

"I'm no art guy, but even I was impressed," he smiled, bumping against her. "I'm thinking that we should try the museum down in Raleigh next."

"He just likes museums because we can't really talk there, and thus, he can't get schooled on the fact that the Republicans suck donkey ass," she declared, swinging the cup up like a torch. "Admit it, Henry. Your people are the devil."

"We are not," he bristled. "Do you want to throw down on this again? Girl, don't make me whip out my FEC argument again." He pantomimed rolling up his sleeves and crouched down in a fighter's stance. "Bring it, San Fran."

"It's already been brung, Brentwood," she laughed, pushing out her fist and gently knocking his chin. "I don't want to depants you in front of May and Logan's little sister."

"I'm not little—just younger," Kerry corrected. "I'm Kerry."

"I'm Henry—I'm Dawn's boyfriend," he grinned. "And punching bag."

Dawn raised her eyebrows and swung her eyes at me. Her head bobbled for a moment, and she scratched her head, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. "Um, we gotta go, okay? I'll call you later. I'm staying home tonight."

He pushed out his lower lip. "Aw, now I'll be lonely. I'll be alone, just me and Mr. Tibbs." He looked at my puzzled expression and explained, "My cat. I call him Mr. Tibbs."

Dawn exploded with laughter, and she grabbed his face, kissing him for a long moment before pushing him back. "Go read an Al Franken book and call me in the morning with your apology," she ordered.

"Go read an American history book and call _me_ with an apology over that Civil War rant of yours—you're gonna feel stupid when you realize how wrong you are about the role of carpetbaggers," he called back, winking at me before walking away.

"Boyfriend?" Dawn hissed as he retreated. "Hello?"

"Well, it's not like 'fuck buddy' is something that you can sling around in genteel company," I replied. "Besides. It's sweet! He likes being with you, it's very adorable."

"Isn't he your friend Stacey's professor?" Kerry asked, looking back at him. "When Lo told me, I guess I was expecting, like, some guy with a pipe and bifocals and one of those tweed coats with the leather patches."

"The coat would be hot," Dawn mused, holding the door open. "We still haven't, you know," she whispered to me as I passed by. She held up a fist and shook it in the air. "Though I finally convinced him let me go down on him."

I winced; that was Dawn, direct as a canon blast. "He liked it?"

"Oh, he's a fan," she giggled.

"How's your book coming?" Kerry asked my sister.

Dawn shrugged. "Slow. It's a hell of a lot harder than I thought. I'm in contact with my old writing professor? She's gonna supervise my independent study in the fall? She told me to, like, meditate every morning, and then before I begin writing, to do 'warm up' writing, as if I was, like, prepping for physical activity. You have to stretch out your brain and creativity before you can launch into the big stuff, you know? I've been doing that for the past two weeks, and it's helped a lot."

I walked up to the reception desk to check in, and when I came back, Dawn was still talking. "And it's hard to think about Sunny, and Ducky and stuff. Ducky's really spiraled down ever since her death. But, you know, this is the after-effect of violence. You can't ignore it."

"That sounds a bit like a cause," I noted, tapping her shoulder.

"Well, I guess this book is my cause," Dawn answered slowly. "I joined a ton of fun things at school—ooh, the Surfing Club is a blast, for the record. But the only, like, activist things? Were College Democrats, which, like, duh, the election was just happening, how could I not? And the second was the EcoClub. 'Cause I still get all furious when I see someone throwing away a can when, hello, all we have to do is put a recycling bin next to it. So obnoxious," she sniffed.

We fell into silence for a moment, and Dawn coughed. "Have you talked to Stacey?"

"Today, I did," I nodded. "She needs more space, Dawnie. Just give her time."

"Why is she so mad?" Kerry asked. "I don't get it. Did she like him?"

"No," Dawn murmured. "I did a bad on her, though. I deserve this—I just hoped that she could forgive me because, well, it's _me_."

I sighed, sliding the stones on my necklace around the chain. "What did you do that was so bad? You keep saying that, but I don't get it. You lied. Big deal."

"It is a big deal," Dawn said, stoning a glance at me. "Drop it, May. Just…tell her that I love her, okay? Whenever I see her in the house, she gives me the Stacey Death Stare, so I don't dare say it. But let her know, okay?"

"The house sounds like a fun place," Kerry said, raising her eyebrow. "I'm so excited."

"You're gonna be in the study—Jeff and Dawn have the upstairs bedroom, so we can't give you a real bed," I apologized. "Still, it's your own room. Gives you some privacy. Gives you some distance from Jeff, too."

"Yeah, my brother thinks you're a fit bird," Dawn laughed. "He wants to make out with you like nobody's business."

Kerry recoiled, slapping her hands over her lips. "Ew, California tongue in my mouth!" she squealed.

"Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, babe," Dawn warned. "Summer fling, Miss Bruno. Learn it, live it, love it. Nobody says you have to get married. Just give it a whirl." She grabbed her phone out of her pocket and pressed a few buttons. "Okay, see? He sent me this from the car." We leaned over to read the text message: _She's feisty. It's a challenge!_ "He's smitten."

"Feisty?" Kerry snorted. "Who am I, Pippi Longstocking?"

My name was called, and the three of us went into the back rooms. I was weighed and prodded and tested, finally ushered to the same room where I had been for my first appointment.

Dr. Chaplin came in soon after with a nurse in tow. "Welcome to the second trimester, Mary Anne," she smiled, waving her clipboard. "How does it feel?"

"Awful," I confessed. "Being off my meds is hard."

"That and just the normal mood swings of the first few months? It's a rocky thing, I know," Dr. Chaplin sighed, rubbing my leg. "But the hormones level off now, the morning sickness is gonna get a hell of a lot better, and you'll feel less tired. These three months are a good ride, I swear. The last three suck," she laughed.

"Thanks," I mumbled. I stole a peek at her, though. "You think it gets better?"

"This new thing has taken root in your body—it's a disruptive, needy thing. And your body needs time to get used to it. By now, it's pretty used to it. Why the last three months are so hard is simply a question of size—as the fetus grows larger, it starts affecting you again, makes your body ache and makes demands on the body. But for now? Things are good. If in two weeks, you're still miserable, then we take a bit of notice." She tightened her mouth and rocked her hands back and forth. "It's gonna be tough with the chemo and radiation, to know, but that's why it's important to tell me everything that you're feeling."

"So, she's cool to start all treatment on Monday," Dawn clarified.

Dr. Chaplin stared at her and then Kerry, tightening her ponytail. "Where's Dad?"

"Stoneybrook," I sighed. Wait. "I mean, Logan's at work. Sorry. I don't suppose you need your teeth cleaned? Tomorrow's his last day at the clinic—master hygienist and all," I giggled.

"I'm getting mine done, and Dawn is, too," Kerry chimed in.

"These are my sisters," I explained with a smile. "My sister Dawn, my sister-in-law Kerry." Kerry straightened, beaming at me and the doctor.

Tapping her fingers against her cheek, Dr. Chaplin gasped and snapped her fingers. "Vista High. Peace Photo Girl, right?"

"Yeah," Dawn blushed. "In the flesh."

"Wow," she breathed. "Gnarly. It's nice to meet you."

"Well, I guess. So, anyway, can May get her treatments?" Dawn replied.

Dr. Chaplin nodded. "I talked with Dr. Wilks, you're good to go. It's going to be chemo heavy with low dose radiation at the beginning of each cycle, targeting the lungs until the tumor has been reduced and the malignancies at the periphery of the lymph nodes has been abated. Baby friendly—or at least, baby benign. I would imagine he's explained all of that to you?"

"Yes," I answered. "I'm ready. I'm really ready. I need to get started." I felt a cough coming on, and I tried to keep it down, but it burst out of my mouth, and I splattered blood into the palm of my hand. I couldn't look up at the doctor handed me a wet cloth to wipe it away.

"It's metastasized again," she noted, her voice so low that Kerry leaned in to listen. "Well, I'm certain that you'll nip it right in the bud. Um, we need to discuss your blood pressure," she noted, sitting down on her stool. "Mary Anne, it's creeping up there—these past two visits, it's been at 132/92, and that's of concern to us. If that systolic number creeps above 140, we're going to have to classify it as chronic hypertension, and then we're looking at a whole host of possible complications."

"Like a heart attack," I shook, and Dawn scooted on the table next to me, putting her arm around my shoulders.

"Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves," the doctor warned. She pulled a pen off of the collar of her t-shirt and began drawing a line. On one end, she bracketed the words _Chronic Hypertension_ and at the other _Eclampsia_. "Okay. So, here's the good news and bad news in the same breath—there aren't any symptoms as we move from mere hypertension to a more severe diagnosis. You won't feel any differently," she told me.

She drew a line in the middle. "All we can do is monitor your blood pressure—it's the only clinical symptom of hypertension and mild preeclampsia. What should happen in your body is that your arteries widen to handle the increase of blood flow—your cardiac system changes from a high resistance-low flow system to one with a low resistance and high flow." She circled the middle line. "In preeclampsia, this widening doesn't happen for some reason, which is problematic, naturally. Now, as for what it is, eclampsia is, well, it's a series of convulsions which lead to seizures and a coma state that can last a few minutes or up to a few hours. The only way for us to know if you've developed eclampsia is if you start convulsions."

A broken heart. A coma. My head began to swirl, so I leaned the lead of it against my sister's shoulder.

Kerry swallowed, taking my hand in hers. I could barely feel her fingers against my skin—I was freezing, even with Dawn's warm body pressing against mine. "So, how do we cure it?"

"Only delivering the baby cures eclampsia, and even then, eclampsia can continue for up to six to eight weeks postpartum. It's hard to know," Dr. Chaplin said, slumping her shoulders down. "We can stop a seizure, but we can't stop the condition. And if you start convulsing, it's so critical that you get to medical help because it can lead to heart failure."

"But, Mary Anne's not that bad yet, right?" Dawn whispered.

Dr. Chaplin nodded, touching my knee. "Right, exactly right. Let's see if she develops hypertension first. If she does, then we'll take a sample of her urine and check for a certain protein—proteinuria. Those two together mean preeclampsia. From there, we wait and see if she starts to develop the side effects with that condition, and from there on, we keep a very close watch on her to see if it further deteriorates."

"We just have to wait and see," Dawn sighed, putting a hand against my face.

"We do," Dr. Chaplin agreed. She took a breath and looked into my eyes. "Mary Anne, something that may alleviate the high blood pressure, the stress on your body? Would be reducing your pregnancy to a singleton. Multiple births is a significant factor in developing hypertension."

"But I want to have the amnio first," I insisted. "I don't want to do…that until after the amnio."

"That's in three weeks—I want to wait until week sixteen. Results will come in fourteen days after that, so that gives us just enough time to terminate before that twenty week mark, which is one of the important time markers in how we classify hypertensive states," the doctor said, writing something into my chart. "Mary Anne, we'll just take this one day at a time, okay?"

I nodded, leaning back at the urging of her hand. My sisters—_sisters_, two of them—sat down in the chairs on the other side of the room as Dr. Chaplin performed the physical exam, chattering on about the side effects and the joys of the upcoming twelve weeks. I dazed out, staring up at the mesh tiles of the ceiling and counting all of the crumbled peaks of the spackling. It wasn't until she began spreading the gel over my stomach that I perked back up again.

"Mary Anne?" she was repeating. "You have a full bladder, right?"

"Just like you said—just like always," I grumbled, holding the crumple of the gown under my scarred chest. I glanced over at Dawn; she knew now. She knew, but she hadn't said a word about what she saw. Was she scared by it? I cleared my throat. "Doctor—I don't know if this is weird," I began in a low voice, "but my chest aches."

Her face knitted in concern. "I was wondering if it would—it's phantom pain, Mary Anne. Your body wants to prep your breasts for breastfeeding, but there is nothing there to prepare. It's like an amputee who still feels pain in their missing limbs."

Like my friend Allison, always scratching at the arm she had lost to bone cancer. I crossed my arms tighter over what I didn't have—it could still hurt. It could hurt so much.

"Okay, Becky is going to do the sonogram—she's a student technician," Dr. Chaplin explained, putting her hand on the nurse's shoulder. "Are you excited?"

"I'm scared," I whispered. "I'm really scared that we'll see that they're not well, that they have ancephaly—I don't know if I can do this." I looked over at my sister, and she swooped over, grabbing one of my hands. Dawn kissed my forehead, and Kerry came to the other side of the table, taking my other hand and squeezing tight.

"We'll look for you, Mary Anne," she told me, catching Dawn's eye. She told my sister, "You can't freak—if you think you'd freak, you should close your eyes, too. I know what it looks like, I can handle it, don't worry," Kerry added, her eyes flickering over the still black screen of the machine.

Dawn crouched down, right next to my face. Those eyes of hers, deep navy like the water of the Atlantic, that ocean riddled with currents and mountains and so much under the surface. "Just look here," she said. "Right here, right at me."

The cold metal of the probe hit my stomach, and I heard the machine snap to life. It was making an odd whoosh, a swooping sound as the tech rumbled the wand over my belly, Dr. Chaplin murmuring encouraging sounds at her. When I glanced over at the screen, my eyes catching the triangle of the view, Dawn cupped her hand around my eyes, forcing me back to her. "Don't look, Mary Anne."

The sound of heartbeats filled the room, a kicking pulse that I could feel more than hear. "Here we go," Dr. Chaplin said, her hand chilling my leg.

I blinked and stared at my sister, pulling her hand to my heart. I looked at her and waited.


	13. Chapter 12

"Don't look," Kerry said again, her hand tightening on mine.

"Those are my babies," I murmured, staring at my sister.

"Just wait," Dawn replied, holding a warm hand to my cheek. "I'm right here."

I closed my eyes. She was right here. But she was not who I wanted. I wanted my mother. I wanted her to take my hand and tell me the story of her first sonogram, the first moment she saw me.

But more than that, as I waited for the image of the twins, the _sosia_, to roll onto the screen, I wanted someone else. My own _sosia_. My other half.

"Babs," I whispered, so full of air that Dawn couldn't hear. "Babsie, I need you."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

_25 December 2007_

_Dearest darling Maybelle,_

_Merry Christmas, pal o'Jesus! Here, it's just another day. I am on a leave hour, stretching my legs before I go back on up to the small perch where _Turai_ Hirsch, master marksman, sits all damned day. I wish I could just read a _People, _you have no clue._ _I just got approved for a transfer to Tel Aviv, to do Border Police work in the city; I'll be positioned throughout key urban areas as a sniper. It'll be my job to gun the hell out of any suspected suicide bomber. In September, a sniper was able to catch a jihadist before he could detonate a bomb in the middle of a crowded market. Do you know how many people he saved? _

_I am going to be that person, too. Oh, May, I'm getting teary just thinking about it!_

_Things at the border are tense, though; there are rumors, I bet you hear them on the news. There has been odd movement on the other side, enough to build concern and send in more units. We border forces are getting backed up by real IDF units, combat units. Is it bad that I'm jealous of them? They say that serving in the armed forces is an Israeli's most sacred duty. I just want to do all that I can. I have this great vision of blasting into Lebanon, of driving Hezbollah so far back that my country never has to live in fear again. I'm tired of being afraid of losing this home. I'm tired of all of the fear. We all are. We are waiting, and it makes my skin just crawl._

_Well, it's Christmukkah, and I have a gift for you, but I haven't gotten around to wrapping it—expect it sometime in late January. Still, I got the Chrismukkah Care Package from you and Logan, and I went all, Oh, my gosh, spoil me much? (Loved the Tar Heel bunny! Ha! Babsie Bunny rides again! Nick'll be so jealous he didn't give it to me. Awesome. Can't wait to taunt him with it.) And your letter…oh, May. I cried so hard, I turned the paper practically into pulp. So. I wanted to send you a little something to say, _I love my May!_ So, I came up with the Top Twenty Reasons Why Mary Anne Spier is My Best Friend._ _Abridged_.

_20) She loves curly hair. _

_19) Her boyfriend and my fiancé totally get along._

_18) She always let me copy off of her homework, but she took the time to teach me things so I could actually do well on tests. And by well, I mean Bs. Which leads me to…_

_17) She's freakin' smart. Period._

_16) She's patient. _

_15) Mary Anne thinks Randa is as funny as Randa thinks she is._

_14) She got a subscription to the University of Arizona newspaper just to read Emmy's articles. Because getting it in print is more meaningful than reading it online._

_13) She's sweeter than summer strawberries._

_12) When I left for Israel, she held my hand until the moment the security guard pushed me through the checkpoint. When her fingers slipped through mine, I felt an emptiness that I hadn't known since Amelia died._

_11) She is the only person that Dawn wants approval from—which causes a lot of friction, um, just a tad, but Dawn Schafer bows to no one but Miss Mary Anne._

_10) When we're in New York, we never need to check a map. She is a map. It's almost freaky._

_9) She believes in magic and mystery._

_8) She loves to know things; knowledge is as vital to her life as bread, water, and air._

_7) The way she makes me feel: that I am the solider, the woman, that I know I can be. Something incredible. It's selfish, but I feel so strong in her eyes. Mary Anne's fatih. Her faith in all of us._

_6) She makes her boyfriend come alive. She makes him shine with confidence—it's like she's the basketball. If that makes sense: her boyfriend only feels good and right on the court, and off of it, he's not. Unless he's with her because Mary Anne makes him feel good and right all the time. I know that feeling, Logan, for sure._

_5) She loves hearing all of my pop culture theories. It's the Tom Cruise Effect! It's the Jennifer Aniston Corollary! It's the Jolie-Pitt Axis of Evil! And she never gives me the 'Bitch craaazy' look, not once. (Note: a 'Bitch craaazy' look can also be called 'Tom Cruise Eyes.')_

_4) She never gives up on her father. _

_3) She never gives up on herself._

_2) One day, Mary Anne will be the best mother in the world. She will make her own mother so proud—it's good ghosts can't breathe because Alma would have her breath just taken away by how good her daughter will be to those children. With such a great mother, will her kids actually need Auntie Babsie? Well, of course! Who else will spoil them and play _Finding Nemo _with them? (I am the Nemo!)_

_1) She loves. Oh, how she loves._

_Merry Christmas, my best friend. I love you, I love you, I miss you so much, if I could count every grain of sand on this ground, that number wouldn't be high enough to count how many times I think about you. I'll see you in six months—_

_Yours always, Babsie._

Barbara was the reason that Logan and I got back together.

The day before my birthday freshman year, I had called her. I went out for a run around East Campus and then returned to my room in a heap of sweat. I pulled out my calling card and punched in that long phone number. The person who answered didn't speak English, but I was used to that by now.

"Hirsch?" I asked. "I'm calling for _Turai_ Barbara Idit Hirsch?"

It took a minute, her name echoing over a speaker, that rank and her last name reverberating into my ear. Then a click and a familiar voice that spoke my language crackled through the phone. "Lemme guess—either…Celia or May?"

"Hey, Babsie," I grinned. "How are you!"

"So good," she gushed. "I just emailed all of you a few minutes ago. In two weeks, I'm getting stationed with the Border Police for a twelve-week deployment up at the Lebanese border. Guess why."

"You got your sharp shooters' medal! Oh, Babs, yay! You're gonna be the hottest sniper in the whole Defense Force!" I squealed.

"If only I could wear hot pants," she sighed. "I think it would really add to my accuracy."

"Tell me all about the exam," I begged, flopping onto my bed.

The way her voice beamed, it made my cheek warm. She was so far away from me. Give her a purpose, her country, and she is strong. Give me a goal, give me something to know and hold, and I am, too.

"So, okay, why are you going to the border then?" I asked. "Shouldn't you be snipering or something at a checkpoint, like, near Gaza? Or what about that patrol you were talking about in Jerusalem?"

"Oh, I'm still doing that—when Nick transfers in January, I'm going into a Border Police unit, and I'll be patrolling urban areas for bombers and stuff. But, it's just normal for everyone to serve time on the perimeter. I'm excited—this is such a critical post, May. I mean, if we have to invade Lebanon again, I'll be placed with an IDF unit—a Defense Force combat group, okay? So, I'm combat ready and stuff. That, and I'm stationed in an area that needs marksmen. I can't tell you more than that, I'm sorry."

"No, no, I understand. I just worry so much about you," I said, blinking hard. Not crying. No crying. It was our rule: no crying and no dying. For either of us.

"May," she said, so soft. A hand on mine.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"I love you," she said back. She cleared her throat. "So, Randa had emailed? Said you're giving her another birthday present today."

I laughed, wiping my eyes dry. "Oh, that Randa. She's so freakin' behind me sleeping with that guy John that she sent me a box of condoms with the Sisterhood Belt—which, hi, smells totally like vodka, so we know what _she_ did on her birthday. Anyway, yeah, I'm all, Randa, girl, relax."

"Are you? Gonna sleep with John?" Barbara asked.

"I don't want to," I admitted. "I just want to go back to Logan, but I know that I shouldn't."

"Maybelle, what the hell are you talking about?" she said, letting out a choked snort.

"I'm supposed to be, like, making sure about us, right? And Randa and Dawn both said that I need to be with more guys, you know, to be sure that Logan's right for me. So I've been on dates and stuff, and nobody's right. But this guy, John? He flat out said he wants to sleep with me, and Randa and Dawn both think I should do it," I babbled. "To get more perspective. And so I told Logan that I was thinking about it."

She gasped, and I heard the rustle of her hair; I could see her fingers digging into her mop of curls, tugging on each tassel of hair. "What did he say?"

I sighed. "He needed a bit of time? To let it sink in? So we hung up for a bit, but he called me back. He sounded like he had been crying, his voice was all scratchy, but he told me that we were giving each other the space to make sure about us, and if I needed to be with someone else to be sure, then he had no right to tell me no."

"Whatever, you could screw half the guys at Duke, and he wouldn't care as long as you came back to him," Barbara sniffed. "He called Nicky after his date last night? Nick said that at one point, Lee started banging his head on his desk, moaning about how he was being Cokied. Do you know what that means? I was like, what?"

"Cokied—girls who just want him because he's all hot and stuff," I giggled. "Poor guy, he's really overwhelmed by girls. He says the girls who hit on him are too aggressive, the girls that he finds cute end up either being too shy to talk to him or are, well, Randa."

"Oh, no," Barbara wailed. "Not that!"

We laughed for a moment, and I added, "Well, yeah, so it sucks for him. But this thing with John? I feel like…I don't know. It's not going anywhere, and I really just want to go back to Logan, he's my angel, but I mean, Babs, did I tell you? John's mom has breast cancer? He gets it, you know? I won't be scared to show him my body. If I'm gonna do this, he's gotta be the guy. I told you this, right?"

"Yeah, you did. And I am with our girls in saying, I'm glad you gave him a serious chance. It's a good thing. But…I don't know, May. Sometimes, I think you feel guilty for saying that, at seventeen, you've found your The One. Which is stupid, because I found my The One in high school, too. You don't see me feeling dumb or silly," she stated. "People come into our lives, and it doesn't matter when. Timing is important, yeah, but not in terms of when. It's important in terms of who you _are_ at the time you meet that person. Like you and me. When we first, like, spent time together? Around Amelia's death? It wasn't right for us to be friends because I was just a ball of grief. But then, a few months later, I had recovered enough to let someone else in, and you were at a point where you were ready to meet new people and stuff. Do you see what I mean?"

"I do," I said, sitting up. I bent over my legs and sighed. "So, you don't think I should sleep with him. Just to see."

"I think you should do whatever you want," Barbara replied. "If you want to sleep with him, do it. But I disagree with the Sexy Twosome, sorry. I'm not gonna advocate screwing just to 'be' with someone else, because I'm only gonna be with one person for my whole life, and I'm not scared of it. Mary Anne, you know I adore you, but sometimes, you get really concerned about what other people think about you. You know—everyone thinks I'm crazy, everyone thinks I'm a cancer freak, whatever. Unless you're surrounded by friends, you get really wrapped up in it. You always end up listening to your own heart in the end, but May, let's be honest. You can wallow like a champ. And here, I'm kinda concerned that you're listening to everyone telling you, Oh, a _high school boyfriend_," she scoffed in a snooty voice. "I'm holding up my nose in the air, for the record—_high school boyfriend_, oh, horrors! Oh, how bourgeoisie! At Duke, we're so much sophisticated than this!"

"Stop," I snickered, running my hand over the short hair that covered my scalp, a near black growth that felt so sweet under my fingers. So missed.

"Well, it's true," she insisted. "Just listen to yourself. And if you decide to sleep with John, that's fine, but just make sure it's not just because you feel like you need experience. And I'm sorry. Sex is usually really overrated. I'd much rather make out."

I smiled, pulling my legs up to my chest. "Best kisser?"

"God damn it, Trevor. Nicky's great, but Trevor had pillow lips. He was Satan, I'm sure, but one hell of a kisser."

I giggled. "Nice."

"Okay, you. Best kisser," she urged.

Licking my lips, I said, "Bob Randall from Iowa. Third guy who ever kissed me, and third time was so the charm. He taught me how to _really_ French kiss, how to really use your tongue and hands, and—whatever, he was great. Pete was terrific, too. John's a good kisser," I mumbled.

"Better than…?" she prompted.

"Oh, heck no. But not bad," I shrugged. "Just, the whole time, it's hard not to wish I was with someone else. Crap. I just want him, Babs. I do. Okay. I think I'm gonna put on some Regina Spektor, some Ben Folds, do a little Mary Anne Dance Party, and just think this over. Just me, thinking this out."

"Good!" Barbara crowed. "Yes! Email me the moment you decide. I will barely be able to concentrate during my shift tonight, you know."

"No, no, you have to save Israel. Focus," I intoned, shaking my fist in the air. "When can I call next?"

"I'll call you—probably after I'm reassigned, so in two weeks, but you can email me just like normal. Though, I will be able to call you for a _minute_ for your birthday tomorrow, okay? Don't answer—I want to leave you a message on your cell. A little oral essay, as it were," she grinned.

"Okay," I sighed. "I love you so damned much, Babsie, my heart turns inside out."

"My May, the poet," Barbara giggled. "I love you, too, Mary Anne. I keep that photo of you and me in Positano in my flak jacket, that and the one of us four girls from the New York trip. Right next to my photo of Nicky and Celia—oh, oh, remember, Chanukah at Indiana U. Did you get your plane ticket yet?"

"I did—Logan booked 'em last week; we can't wait see you and see Nicky and stuff. He misses you," I replied. "He said that your emails crack his shit up."

"Yeah, well, Adventures in Babsie Army World are a real comedy club," she laughed. "I personally thought I did a bang up job describing the grenade training, ha ha."

"Ha, ha," I rolled my eyes. "Well, I better let you go."

"Never," she said. "We're just parting for a short while. Happy pre-birthday, happy getting back with your The One day, and happy just being you day."

"Thanks, Babs. Kiss," I added, smacking my lips together.

"Kiss, kiss, kiss!" she chirped, pressing her lips to the receiver and making the air smudge over with their touch. "Bye!"

The phone went dead, taking my Barbara away. I looked up at the wall, at the map of Israel I had set over a corkboard. Pulling out two blue thumbtacks, I strung a red ribbon across the whole line of the Lebanese border; she would be somewhere there. Somewhere in there, wielding a weapon to keep her country safe. Would she be safe?

Come back to me, Barbara. Come back to me, I prayed, curling my fingers over the smooth paper.

She didn't. But Logan did. I called him that night and told him to meet me for lunch—I couldn't wait until Saturday night, my birthday night, no. I wanted to see him as soon as possible, Barbara's words cooking in my blood. Barbara, how she knew me like no one else.

No one else was my _sosia_.

_27 December 2007_

_May—_

_We're mobilizing. I'll write more when I can. _

_Please don't pray for me—pray for Israel. _

_I love you—Babs._

It came on January ninth. It came too late for any of my words.

All of my words, ripped away. Mr. Hirsch called me on December twenty-ninth, and all he said was, "She's dead, Mary Anne. Barbara is dead. She's been killed in action."

He hung up, and my legs evaporated. I laid on the floor of the kitchen and held that phone for an hour, not moving or thinking. Waiting for him to call me back and say it was a joke, a sick joke. But he never called; Barbara's sister did, an hour later, with the information for the funeral. How soon we would all have to leave.

"If you want to come," Cecily said. "I know you have to leave for school in a day or two. And, I mean, flying to Israel in the midst of armed conflict isn't exactly the smartest idea. But, if you want to—"

"Tell me your flight number, I'll be on it," I thudded, grabbing a pen and writing down that number on my palm. I did what I needed to do: I reserved a ticket from New York to Tel Aviv, from Tel Aviv to Miami and then connecting back to Durham. I would do this, I would. I went upstairs and packed my suitcases for Duke, adding in every piece of black clothing I owned. I pulled off the green sweater I had on and exchanged it for a black blouse to match my black skirt. To match my dark hair.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I looked like a line of death, the bones in my chest ridging up against my pale skin. I had fought death off; if I hadn't, I would be with Barbara right now. I could keep her company, I could hold her hand. I would be the wise one, the comfort, the strength.

Instead she was gone. And I was here, and I looked like I would jump into the River Styx if I only had the chance. _Let it be me_.

Both the house phone and my cell erupted at the same time. I answered my cell first, hearing Emily's gasping breath. "I'm driving to Phoenix right now," she sniffed. "Shit, I hate myself so much for coming back to Tucson for these stupid, stupid basketball games. Okay, shit. Okay. I'm going from Phoenix to Atlanta to Tel Aviv. You're coming right? Have you got a hotel yet?"

"No hotel yet," I said, smoothing my hands on my skirt.

"I got one, so you can stay with me. And Randa, Randa was at Temple, they told her there. And then they called me, and I guess they called you last. They didn't know how to tell you."

"He said it so simply, Emily," I breathed. "Just like that: Barbara is dead."

"She's dead," Emily cried. "Oh, God, I can't drive. Hold on, I need to pull onto the shoulder." I heard the clicking of her turn signal, then the car door opening and slamming shut. Crunching, crunching, the sound of Emily running deep into the desert. "May, I—this wasn't supposed to be Barbara. We spent so long trying to be okay with you leaving us, we just—just never thought it could be anyone but you. And you lived, right? You lived, so none of us would die. Not yet, this isn't fair, why us?"

"Because we can handle it," I said, resting my head against the table.

"I don't want to handle it," Emily wailed. "I want Barbara. May, you have to promise that you won't die. You can't, you can't."

She said it so many times that the words lost their shape, devolving into these sounds, puffy with her hysterical, heavy sobs. I listened to her cry for twenty minutes; I wondered what would grow on the dead sand in the wake of all of her water. If something would bloom in that place. From Emily, for Barbara.

The home phone kept ringing, over and over again: Miranda. "You're on the Hirschs' flight? I am, too. I can't drive with them, though. Mr. Hirsch and Cecily are so devastated, I just can't be with them right now. I want to be with you. How do you want to get down to the city?"

I bit my lip. "My dad and Sharon are in New Haven for a party with her work. And Dawn's in California…I don't know. No. Logan's got a late flight out of JFK back to Durham, I can ask him to drop us off at LaGuardia. I'll call him right now."

"Have you told anyone else yet?" Miranda asked, her voice so dull, it sounded like paper. "My parents told Ry and Micah. I can't say it. I just can't."

"I haven't either. I packed, though. I guess I have to—Dad and Sharon will wonder where I've gone," I replied, running my finger in the seam of the table.

"Don't' die on me," Miranda blurted out. "Please. I can't say goodbye to you, too. I have met cool people at UConn, but they aren't you and the girls. We can't do this again."

"Emily said the same thing," I whispered. My thumbnail caught hard against a splinter. "I can't promise you anything."

"Yes, you can," Miranda begged. "Please, just promise me. Say you won't die. Please, say it. Tell me that you won't follow Babs."

"I won't die. I won't," I repeated, and my tongue burned.

By January ninth, I had been wearing black for twelve days. Each night, I drove over to Chapel Hill and slept in Logan's narrow bed, sleeping in the dress I wore to her funeral. My body was wrapped in him and in the flag that had been on Barbara's coffin; it was large enough to cover us both, but it was mine. The soldiers gave it to her father who gave it to Cecily who gave it to me.

"She'd want this to go to you," her sister mumbled, curling my fingers around its crisp edges. She gave the sharpshooter's medal to Emily, the brass Star of David from her lapel, gritty with the scrape of sand to Miranda, and the flag of her home to me.

Barbara, who said that home is other people. That flag was mine.

On January ninth, I sat on the hood of my car with the flag balled up on the passenger's seat, where I had shrugged it off in a heap. I sat shivering in the gentle gray cold of the winter morning, staring ahead at the curve of the UNC basketball arena. Waiting, waiting. When the white vans pulled up in front of my eyes, I had to blink a few times to bring them into focus.

There was a whole world going on. Why?

Several bodies piled out of the vans, stretching their oversized bodies in the brisk air. Eyes fell on me like stars, and a few of the boys walked over.

"I'm so sorry about your friend," Todd said, scuffing his shoes against the pavement.

"Very sorry," Veron told me, and the starting point guard, my boyfriend's hero, reached out and kissed my cheek, squeezing the cold blocks of my hands, crumpling the letters that I kept clutching amongst my fingers.

"Hey," Logan said, walking over, shifting his overnight bag to his other shoulder. He was still ten steps from me when I held out the letters, and the other boys fell away as he squinted at the handwriting. "Oh, wow, from Barbara?"

"Yeah," I mumbled. "They came yesterday. I can't open them."

He glanced at his watch. "You want to go somewhere?"

"You're going to miss Western Civ," I said. Say that's okay. Tell me it's okay, that I'm not bad for wanting you right now.

He snorted. "Whatever. Coach has us excused through noon, and if I skip comp class this afternoon, I'm sure I can bat my eyes and talk about how beating the snot outta Miami was exhausting. Come on," he prodded, rolling a hand on my hip, my black covered bones.

I slid into the passenger seat and leaned down into his lap, spreading the flag over my body like a blanket. "Where do you think we should go?" I asked, staring at his feet moving over the pedals. Go fast, go stop. Go, go.

"Anywhere you want—how much time do you have?" he replied. "I mean, we can get out of town, go down to Raleigh, drive on out to the beach or up to Pilot Mountain, we can go anywhere you want. It's up to you."

"I want to go to the ocean," I answered. "I want to go to the water."

"Okay," he said, turning us onto the highway out of town.

The entire two and a half hours, we were quiet. I held onto his hand like a drowning person clutches at a life ring, a desperate grab at something that promises to bring you safely out of the storm. His fingers turned white and violet from the pressure of me on his skin, but other than flexing our shared fist, he didn't pull away. He would shuffle his fingers deeper against mine, stretching out the tapered lengths of those digits, and recurl them around my palm. I put the letters under my cheek, and I could feel the ink of Barbara's cursive handwriting transferring over on to my face. A mark, a scar, my Babsie.

The car stopped, and he bent down over me. "We're at the public beach—is this okay? No one's here."

"Who would be, it's freezing outside," I shrugged, pressing my hands on his leg to raise back up. I sniffed at the bite of salt and rough, weedy sand that flooded the air. When I glanced out the windshield, the anger of the ocean made me shudder. The fists of surf slammed on the shore, shearing at the beach and yanking back massive shoulders of sand in its wake. The water was a furious greened-over gray mass, roiling and screaming its way to land. It looked vengeful.

Maybe it knew, too.

We left the car and walked into the wind, stopping as close as we dared go to the water. Logan settled on the sand, unzipping his jacket and pulling it around me as I scooted into the cave he created with the bend of his legs. I held the letters to my heart and stared out at the ocean as he kissed my cheek. Where those words were now.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't even ask how your game went. I read about it on ESPN, as per usual—I just can't watch, you know, scary Logan and all. You played for a long time—you did so good," I beamed, turning my face to his.

He grinned at me. "Yeah—Superstar collided pretty hard with their center, so Coach had him sit for a lot of the second half? To rest his knee and all. So, I got to take over. I think I did pretty good, too. It wasn't great, but twelve solid minutes against Miami? That's not bad. Next year, though, it's all me," he declared, spreading his hands in front of us. "I feel really bad, like, I'm such a step down from who we've got, right, but the rest of the guys are just sick good, so maybe it will balance out okay."

"I know it will," I stated, rubbing his face. "You'll be incredible—you'll make everyone else shine, just wait."

"I hate waiting," he grumbled, kissing me on the cheek again. I shifted so that his lips caught my mouth, and we held there for a long time, warm against the cold. I waited until my tongue felt ready enough to talk about Barbara. To say her name.

Barbara is dead. I am not. Why?

"Are you ready?" he asked as he pulled back.

"No," I whispered, putting my head against his collarbone. "But I can't hold these forever." I slid my finger in the small flap of the thinner envelope and ripped it open, drawing out the small square of paper where Barbara had written only three sentences. "Oh, God, angel, this is from the day before she died."

"Mobilizing…she died at her station, right? They must not have left yet," he concluded. "Wow. She was going into combat, Mary Anne. She must have been so proud, don't you think?"

"Yeah," I replied, rubbing those words with the tips of my fingers. "She had wanted to be in a combat unit so bad, but she was such a good sniper. All accuracy, isn't she?"

"Drove Stacey nuts," he smiled, resting his chin on the top of my head. "How is Stacey doing with this?"

I shrugged. "As well as Stacey deals with anything. I don't know—Dawn's been driving down every night to stay with her. I think Stacey feels guilty more than anything because Babs tried to stay in contact with her, but Stacey just got so busy at school and stuff."

"It happens—I think it's almost creepy how you and your girls have stayed so close. The only person I talk to from high school is Nick, and that's mostly because you and Babs are—I mean…he's not taking this well at all," he sighed. "I told him to take time off, right, but Indiana readmitted him, and he's just shutting everyone out and going to class and working as a student manager for their team. Maybe it's best that he's staying busy."

"I thought he was going to jump in her grave," I murmured, wiping at my eyes. I didn't want her words to blur. To hurt them at all with my tears. "He refused to even touch anything of hers, anything from the Army. He took all of her stuffed bunnies, though, put them in a suitcase. He wanted all of the Babsie bunnies," I choked, slamming my hand over my eyes. "They gave him back her ring, Logan. It had burn marks all over it, did I tell you that? Her hands must have—"

He hummed a hushing noise into my ears as I sobbed, taking the letter from my hands and placing it into his pocket. Somewhere safe from me and my grief. If I closed my eyes, I could see it: Barbara, crouching in the metal hub on top of her station, her rifle held ready in those hands. The gleam of her engagement ring in the blink of antennae lights, the only shine in the dark night.

And then everything shredded, everything blasting away and down, my Barbara hurled back against the wall as her tower was peeled apart by the angry scream of a bomb. I had seen the photos on CNN, the crumpled waste of her station. _Hezbollah Mortars Kill Eight Israeli Soldiers at Lebanon Border; American Among the Dead_. The mention of the American soldier. Dawn had emailed the article to me, and I sat at an internet café in Tel Aviv and cried. Barbara was Israeli, she was, she would have hated that tag, the fact that she was noted because of the place she was born and raised. She would have despised having her face known above all others.

It's not why she died, to be the American.

But _how_ had she died? Was it over in that instant, the moment the night bloomed red and orange and yellow with fire? Did her eyes see that plume and then go blind? Or was it more, did she see more, did she have to lie there in a puddle of her own blood and sheared body for long enough to know? She did know she was going to die?

I did; I knew that I was going to die, that my heart was ticking down. And it's the most horrible moment, to see that end, see it in front of you as clear as a hand. Did she?

What happened to you, Barbara? Tell me. Come to me.

"She hasn't come to me," I managed, tugging my sleeve and using it as a tissue for my eyes. "I smell oranges all day long—Mom's here. But Barbara hasn't come once. I don't know why she wouldn't let me know that she's okay."

"Maybe she has faith that you _know_ she's okay without her having to say," Logan suggested. "Or maybe she's—I don't know, this sounds dumb, but maybe she's still, like, settling in? None of us knows what happens when you die—you came back, pretty girl, you can't even say."

"Or maybe she's with Amelia," I added. "It's selfish of me to want her to leave Amelia after they've been apart for so long. They need to be together."

"I bet Amelia's taking real good care of her. And if your mom is here, maybe Barbara's asked her to be here since Babs can't. At the very least, the fact that Alma's around says that you are loved and protected when you need it most, right?" he asked.

I nodded, pulling his arm tighter around my waist. "Yeah, I think so, too," I agreed. His head wrapped over my shoulder as I ripped into the next letter.

"Merry Christmas," he read, kissing my neck. "That's too funny. She called Nick that day and gave him a bitch out about clinging to his Christian traditions. And he was all, 'I love my tree,'" Logan said in a flat Eastern whine.

"You do our accent so badly," I giggled. "Don't even try." I kept reading past her words about her job, clenching a fist against my heart as her pride slammed out of her letter. I raised that hand to my mouth and mumbled, "Abridged. That's what I wrote to her for Christmas—an abridged discussion of why Barbara Hirsch was the most incredible person on the planet. I even footnoted it."

"You did not," he laughed.

"I did, too. I even put it in APA format," I declared, shaking the paper. I read down her list and felt my strength erode like the sand as I saw each number, another reason why she loved me. I wasn't that good, I wasn't worth all of this praise. I got Emily's paper because I loved Emily and her wonderful words. I laughed at Miranda because she was the funniest person I had ever met. I loved Logan because he _was_ good, I didn't bring it out of him.

_She loves. Oh, how she loves_. I love you. Come back.

Can you do that? Can you will someone back to you?

There was a hot smear of tears on my neck. "Damn that Babs," Logan mumbled, brushing his fingers over his eyes. "She's made me cry so much, I could raise the Atlantic by a foot by now."

"I don't make you come alive—you're incredible, just as you are," I protested.

"It's the fact that you think that," he began, but his voice was so tight that he stopped and coughed. "It's just the fact that you think that. That's enough, Mary Anne."

I made an annoyed cluck, but he held my face and kissed me to stop my words. "Don't," he asked. "Anyway, I agree with her, absolutely, though my top twenty are different."

"Yeah?" I grinned. "I think we should do that one of these days."

"I think we do it when we get home," he replied. "Anyway, I think she's totally right with number two. You are going to make the most amazing mom, it's just gonna be awesome to watch you with your kids."

"With…our kids?" I corrected, edging my eyes over to him.

He grinned. "Yes." He slid his hands over mine, holding the letter in concert with me. "Mary Anne, do you want to, like, get married now? I know we kinda talked about eloping and stuff, and I still mean it. You want to, and we can be married in twenty-four hours, I swear. I'll do it tomorrow, if you ask."

"No, I want to wait. I want a big, stupid wedding, lots of pomp and circumstance" I replied. "I think I'll even let Stacey plan it—you know she'd create something perfect. Though I'd insist on executive approval," I frowned. I shrugged and turned to look him right in the eye. "I'm going to marry you. Pencil it in, no later than the June after graduation." I touched my tongue against my lips and said, "We'll have to adopt, you know. It might be a long time before kids."

"We'll be like Brad and Angelina, we'll create a mini-UN with all of our kids," he declared. "I want to be Secretary General, though."

"General Lee," I teased, and he narrowed his eyes at me. "Admit it, you love it."

"He _lost_," Logan spat. "Hello? I'm winning an NCAA title by graduation, pencil _that _in."

I laughed until the image of me and him and our children crept into my eyes. My children that would never know Barbara. She had urged us back together, she would be a part of our story. My daughters would lean on their elbows and ask, _How did you and Dad get together?_

And I would smile and say, _Well. Your dad and I just couldn't shake each other. Two times, we tried, and nope. Just kept coming back. The first time, I loved him, but we couldn't make it work at all. And we were so young. Dad was just too much of a fourteen year old bossypants. So I forgot about him for a while. And then, he came back from boarding school, and he dated my best friend—_

_Mom!_ they'd squeal. _That violates the Girl Code!_

_Oh, I know_, I'd giggle. _But it was like one of those exceptions to the Code, I'll save that for when your Aunt Randa comes. I don't want to steal her thunder. Anyway, he dated Aunt Randa for a year, and I was still dating this other guy? But then we got back together, and we stayed together until we got to college. And then, we were both a little freaked that maybe we were too serious? So, we decided that we wouldn't see each other for a whole month, that we'd go on dates and stuff._

Their faces would round like the moon. _Did you meet anyone?_

_Nope. But I felt guilty! Like I was supposed to find someone else and whatnot. And it was your Aunt Babs who told me that I was being silly. So. Instead of wasting more time apart, Dad and I got back together on my eighteenth birthday, and we've been together since._

And in my head, my daughters were at least eleven. And the number they said was never less than twenty. _Wow, twenty-two years. _Or _Wow, almost thirty years_.

Some huge number. And then one would turn to the other and say, _I always knew Aunt Babs was awesome._

_Can we call Aunt Babs? When is she going to come to America for another visit?_ the other would beg.

I would laugh and grab the phone. _Go ahead and ask her. Tell her that I need some Babsie and to hop on a darned plane._

Because it would be that easy to get to her. It would be that easy.

So I cried, I bawled into his chest, my heart echoing the feel of his own and my tears racing out with the same intensity of the waves on the beach. I waited for the smell of strawberries to wrap around me, to comfort me, to help me right myself. But there was only the smell of the ocean, of ginger and mint from his body, and a slight curl of oranges over it all. Over the idea of my children and my husband and not of my Barbara.

_Next voicemail, September 22, two p.m.:_

_Hey, May, happy birthday, baby! Eighteen, finally. Now you can join the army! Come on over here, you can come sit in my little squeeze of a sniper's shelter. We can discuss the absolute evil that is Kirsten Dunst. She is _so_ overrated, don't you think? Fuck it, anyway. Um. I hope you're not answering because you're off reuniting with our darling Lee, that you're not staring at the phone and waiting to check for this voicemail. I love you two together—makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Like a bunny, hee! Hee, oh, boy. Sorry. Um. Yeah. Anyway, it's your birthday, and now you're officially an adult, not like you haven't been grown up for years now. I just wanted you to know—when I get scared, which happens sometimes, sometimes at night? When it gets so quiet, you start to hear things? Anyway, when I get scared, I think: what would Mary Anne do? My May faced down cancer and death, and she just kicked its ass. She never said, I'm giving up. Nope, my May, she fought and fought, and now she's eighteen. And vurry, vurry pa-reety, a vurry pa-reety girl. Hee! Sorry, ah, anyway. When we're forty, we'll be able to go, Damn, did we do something—look what we came through to become these old women. Maybe we should get Botox. I bet Stacey would. Well, right, we'll be old and boring, and Nick and Logan will be even _more_ boring, for reals, but we'll clink together our martini glasses and look back and say, We sure did make it through to become awesome. But you're already awesome. You're my, forgive me for butchering this, my _sosia? _So-see-ah? You're my other half. And so, today, your first day as a legal adult, I wanted to say, I adore you, and I love you, and I can't wait to see the rest of your life. Kiss, kiss, from your Babsie fish! And I better go. _Adiosauf weidersein_, later, Maybelle!_

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A tar was spreading on my skin, my eyes. It was sinking me down lower than my bones, and I struggled to stay upright on the drive home.

Dawn scrambled out of the driver's seat and came around to my door, offering me her hands to help me out. "Do you want a piggyback ride into the house? Or do you think you can make it?"

"I can make it," I grunted, pushing her off of me. "I'm just a little tired."

"You're not tired," Dawn sighed. She put her hand again on my elbow and walked at my side as I shuffled into the house, batting at the handle of the door until my fingers made contact with the metal.

Kerry came loping up to us, her duffle bag in her hands. "Aren't we going to the game?" she asked.

"May's having a depressive low," Dawn mumbled, and I spun around to glare at her.

"I am not," I snapped, rubbing my eyes. "I'm just really tired, God, leave me alone, Dawn. You're not your sister's keeper, okay?"

She pressed her lips together and looked at Kerry. "I'll drive you to the game once I get May settled in. May, why don't we just put in a movie, order in pizza with lots of peppers—peppers are her weird craving, Kerry—and just relax. Just push through this bad moment, okay?"

"I'm fine," I hissed, grabbing the railing on the stairs. "Just leave me alone!"

But the sound of Dawn's sympathetic murmurs rose up to me like the tide; it felt like a slap on the face. I was depressed, I was this sick thing to be coddled. Like a petulant child, overindulged.

I was the mental health version of Jenny Prezzioso.

And I hated myself so much in that moment that my teeth ached.

Slamming the door to my bedroom shut, I ran my hands over my face. I was _not_ depressed, I wasn't, it had been a long day. A hard day. And Barbara was on my mind, laying over every thought like a blanket. Why?

Last night, I had a dream, a dream that left me shaken and mortified. It was freshman year of high school, and I was dating Logan for some reason. My hair was long again, the way it looked back when he and I first met, curling down against the rise of my growing breasts. There was this image of him and me walking down the hallways, our hands locked together—his bored expression, how his hand was too loose in mine. And then we were in my bedroom, and he was saying _I love you, but I want to see other people. I want to be sure_. So I begged, I grabbed his hands and begged him not to leave me, that I would do _anything, anything_, and I took off his clothes and mine and slept with him right there. I could see a calendar on my wall, the days crossed off, my birthday circled: it was three days before the twenty-second. I was thirteen, I was having sex, I was biting my lip and drawing blood as he shoved into me with a carelessness that he had never done in real life.

But it hurt in a real way, a horrible way. I winced in my sleep at the tear between my legs.

And then there were flashes of me and him at school, him flirting with girls right in front of me but it was okay, he was still mine, he was still mine because he was screwing me after school. That's what I overheard Pete Black tell Austin Bentley, _Bruno's screwing Mary Anne. Says she's pretty good._ Once, I was waiting for him after football practice, and the guys trailing out of the locker room looked me over like I was something in a shelf to be fondled and grabbed and shoved back without purchase. The way they were dragging their eyes over me said, _I'd fuck you, too. At least once_.

At that moment, I thought to myself, I'm dreaming and I have to get out. I'm asleep, I have to wake up. But I couldn't I was trapped, stuck watching him batter me with his discare of my heart—kissing Stacey McGill and stroking her hair at a party but slamming into my skin while I pleaded for him to tell me that he loved me. _Say that you love me_, I gasped with each push.

_I love you_, he mumbled, grabbing the side of my face.

The next image, I was sitting in math class, and I looked down at my desk, but I looked past the paper, down to my belly. And it was a rounded thing, a growing thing. When I brushed my hand against it, I could feel the kick of four legs under my skin.

I turned to Barbara and whispered, _I'm pregnant, Babs._

She laced her fingers with mine and said, _You'll make the most amazing mother._

_I'm only fourteen, I'm a good girl, I'm only fourteen_, I whimpered.

And her fingers crunched into her curls as she promised, _Oh, May, you're still a good girl. And it'll be you and me. We'll take care of this together. You aren't alone. _

I looked down at my stomach again and then glanced at Barbara. Instead of my Barbara, my Babsie, _sosia mia_, there was a solider with a piece of metal jammed into her throat and charred, ruined skin. Not an inch had been safe from the fire. The soldier opened her mouth to speak, but there was the sound of babies wailing, of a bomb whistling in, of all of it mixed together like a terrible, black-coated scream.

"Mary Anne," Logan said sharply, shaking my shoulders. He was crouched over my body, staring at me in a panic. "Wake up, Mary Anne, come on, wake up."

I was panting, wiping at the sweat that was biting into my eyes. "I had a nightmare."

"I know. You were screaming," he sighed, stroking my face. "Was it the werewolf again? The tornado? Not your mom, right?"

"No. When I see Mom, it's just a dream. It's always the same thing—us making the nursery together. This was different. This was about you," I admitted. I reached up and hooked my fingers on his collarbone. "Logan. When you talked about us, about us having sex, to your friends? What did you say. Back in high school."

"I didn't have friends in high school," he said, his face drooping. "The only guys I ever talked to were Nick and Davis. Everybody else just sucked."

"But they knew," I insisted, digging harder at his skin. "I'd come to school smelling like you and you like me, I'd wear your sweatshirts and stuff. Everybody knew. Did you ever say that you were—did they ever ask if you were—the verbs. What were they. The verbs that they would use."

"You mean, did they ever ask if we were fucking?" he spat. "Yeah. Trevor asked once after weights one morning in, like, October, so I punched him. He didn't get that black eye from the Nautilus machine like he said. No one said a single thing after that. What you and I do, that's our business. And it's not that verb."

"In my dream, you were hurting me. You didn't care about me. And you got me pregnant," I recited, so dull, so tired. "And Barbara…I saw her like she was after she died. How her body must have been. Angel—she must have suffered so much," I whimpered, "She must have been in horrible pain."

"Or she died so quickly, she didn't even have time to shut her eyes. You have to believe that, Mary Anne. Don't do this to yourself, don't." Logan laid down on top of me like a shelter of skin. "I love you, I do."

"You said that, too," I breathed, wrapping my arms around his neck.

It was so real, that dream; it was still so real, the sweet after where he kissed every inch of my body and swore how much he was mine. Until I shuck that dream aside and believed him. He pulled my legs against his chest and stroked them like a bow hitting the strings of a violin, he curled his fingers over my face over and over again until my body finally yielded. I believed.

I walked over to the dresser, stripping all of my clothes off, and trading them for the white and red negligee that Dawn and I had bought. Climbing into bed, I wrapped myself in the fleece blanket, the same shine of blue as his eyes, and I let myself sleep.

I was tired. I was tired. That was all. Right?

A hand brushed over my back. "Pretty girl?"

My eyes opened and found the blurred numbers on the clock. A quarter to midnight. "It's so late," I mumbled, wiping at my eyes.

"It is," Logan agreed, stretching out next to me. His arm reached over my body and set a copy of _East of Eden_ on my bed stand. "I came up here after we got home? Poor Jeff, I kinda sorta roughed his ass up, I had to make him a dozen ice packs." I twisted my head back to grin at him, as he continued, "Anyway, Dawn had ordered pizza, so I brought you up some? But you were absolutely out of it. I've been trying to wake you up every hour since."

"I'm hungry," I yawned, and he handed me the plate with two slices of a pepper-coated pizza. I laid there on my side and plowed through the food. I set the empty plate on the floor, and J.D. came bounding over to lick the grease away. "We need to put her in the crate."

"I'll do it," he offered, crawling down to the floor and giving her a long series of pats and scratches before opening up the door to her cage. "Good-night, little puppy," he said, his voice higher than usual.

"I want to set a ground rule: no baby talk from you, ever," I giggled, wrestling up to a sitting position. "You sound so—what?" I stopped, running my hands over my face, my body. "What's wrong?"

Logan rose up to his knees, just staring at me. His head drifted to one side, and his eyes took on a dazed look. I glanced down at myself, the white of the satin on the white of my skin, the scatter of red dots whirling around all of me in a hypnotic pattern. The press of my abdomen was visible through the thin gown—this is a piece of clothing you wear to encourage the making of such things.

"Wow," he managed, shuttling over to the side of the bed, still folded down on his legs. I smiled, tugging off the blanket from the lower half of my body. Putting his hands under the crinoline hem, he traced his way down to the red painted toes, squeezing them as he said again, "Wow."

"You like it?" I asked, putting my leg on his shoulder. He kissed my calf and leaned against my leg, nodding vigorously.

"Is this…for celebration? Or for softening the blow," Logan asked, moving my leg back off of his body. "_Tesorina_, what happened at the doctor's? Dawn and Kerry said that you had to be the one to tell me. What happened, Mary Anne. Please, tell me."

I rolled over the bed and grabbed my purse from his side. I tugged out the sonogram photo and patted the bed in front of me. He sat down, and I put the picture face down in my lap. "First, I need to tell you about the complications. Don't get scared," I warned, launching into everything that she had said. Broken hearts, broken heads. His face turned over and paled at the word _coma_. At _cardiac arrest_, his arms spread open and then tightened, as if he was holding a body. Running with a body, cradling a body that went from alive to dead in a second.

"It's okay," I told him, kissing each knuckle on his hands. "It's going to be okay. They're going to keep a close watch on me, and every day that I go in for chemo, they always take my blood pressure and stuff. I mean, think of it this way—the cancer is going to let them keep a closer eye on this hypertension deal that I'd get if there _was_ no cancer."

"The sonogram," Logan urged, moving our hands on top of it. "Mary Anne. Please."

I took a deep breath and unwound my fingers from his, handing him the photograph. He took it from my hand and pulled it close to his face so he could see without squinting, and for a second, a beautiful gleaming moment, his face glowed. The photograph dropped, and so did he, plummeting into my lap and letting out little gasps of air. I ran my fingers over the soft dome of his head. Round and right, just like the two heads in the sonogram.

Unbroken babies. Maybe. There was so much we couldn't see.

But this was enough for now. I kept rubbing his shoulders and his head until he sniffed a few times, straightening up enough to grab me in a hug. "I'm so happy," he said, rocking me back and forth. "Oh, thank God, I was so worried, I thought—"

"I know," I said, snaking my face in to kiss him. " I know, me too."

He drew back and put his hands on my stomach. "Okay. So. Now, we wait for the amnio, so in five weeks from now, you'll have to—at least one of them, right? It's too much of a risk, so we'll have to terminate."

"What did you mean, 'at least one of them"'" I asked, narrowing my eyes.

Logan blinked at me, his head jerking back. "Well, I mean, if neither of the fetuses match, like, if they their chromosomes are mutated? Then you'll be putting your own life in jeopardy and for what?"

"Because these are _our_ babies—angel, we were never supposed to have kids. It's like a miracle, I, I can't, I can't just do that. I understand why I can't keep them both, I do, but I refuse to let go of both of them. No," I insisted, my voice crackling.

"Mary Anne, you could die, don't you get this? Hell, you could make remission, and be okay, be just fine, but then the pregnancy kills you—we played that game, if there was no cancer, what would we do? Pretty girl, we didn't play the 'You could have a heart attack and coma and all kinds of nasty shit' game. Everything has changed," he shot back, pressing his fingers against my belly. "You could _die_. Everything has changed."

"No, it hasn't," I gritted, settling on my knees. "I want to be a mother, Logan. Don't take this away from me."

"I'm not taking anything away from you! Jesus, Mary Anne, don't you think I want a baby that's you? That would have your eyes, your smile? Are you kidding me, of course I do, but I refuse to be so selfish to want that at the expense of your life. No fucking way. We still have so much time to be parents—we'll adopt, we will, tons of kids, as many as you want. But we won't do this. These babies are supposed to save you, not kill you," Logan declared in a low, needling tone.

I gasped and pointed at him. "That's why you want them. To save me. My dad was right—you don't want them at all unless you can use them for me."

"No!" he yelled. "That's not true!"

"Yes, it is, yes, it is," I retorted through angry breath. "Admit it."

"Well, then, admit that you want a baby as some kind of, like, suicide prevention. How is that any different, huh? I want to save you, you want to save me—don't act as though I'm so bad," he hissed. "You can't be pregnant just because you want a baby, Mary Anne. It's not that easy. You have cancer, you have a fight that you need to focus on, you have a body that is not healthy, you don't have the luxury of screwing around with this."

"Is that what a baby is to you? Screwing around? I'm being so stupid, huh? I want this," I shouted, balling my hands into fists.

"And I want you!" Logan slapped his hands on the top of his head. "Please! Tell me that if neither of them are matches, we'll end this."

"What is this 'we?' My body, my choice, you said that," I snapped.

"But it's your life now, too," he choked, scraping his fingers into his scalp. "And your life is my life, pretty girl, your life is my life. Don't do this to us, don't put everything at risk, please." He grabbed my hands and pulled them against his heart. "Please, Mary Anne," he begged.

I jerked my hands back. "Get out. Get out of here. I can't even look at you right now. You want me to just chuck everything that I've ever wanted—I want to me a mother, you can't make me give it up, no," I stated with an angry curl on my lips. "Get away from me, I don't want to see you, just no."

"You're kicking me out?" he gaped, reeling back.

"Yes. Get out. Get out, get _out_!" I screamed, balling my body like a fist. I didn't watch him get off the bed, back out the door. But I heard him begin to cry at the foot of the stairs, the way he was trying to swallow back that awful sound of tears as he crept out the front door. A few minutes later, his car roared to life, and I could hear the murmur of it driving away.

Getting away, just like I asked. He always did what I asked, didn't he.

Dawn appeared in my doorway. "May?" she whispered. "What was going on?"

I wanted to tell her, to narrate all that she had heard. I wanted to apologize, to have her forgive me for being mean to her and cruel to him, I wanted her to forgive me for this _want_. Absolve me. Cradle me close like a mother would and make it better.

But all I could say was, "I want." Barbara, my mother, answers. A cure, my health, promises. A baby. My husband. My life.

Dawn wrapped her arms around me and lowed me to the bed. She held me like a lover in the place where my lover would be. She held me to her body and wiped my tears as I wailed myself to sleep. The kind of crying that comes from a child.


	14. Chapter 13, Part I: Her

I picked my graduation cap from the lawn and put it back on my head. The tassel tickled my cheek as I glanced around the crowds for my friends. For anyone. Kristy was giggling with Abby a few yards away, Pete Black pointing a camera at their smiling faces. Dawn was shrieking with Stacey, but I couldn't see her. There were still beach balls bouncing around the herds of students, silly string dancing in the breeze, bubbles popping in mid-air and showering us with a soapy rain. It was a circus.

I took a large breath: this was the first minute of the rest of my life. My adult life.

My boyfriend came up behind me and put his arm around my waist. "Thrilling," Logan drawled. "I'm so glad I snuck a _Sports Illustrated_ into my graduation program."

"Yeah, well, some of us were forced into paying attention. I had to sit on the darned platform the whole time, and Lauren Hoffman was at her most anal. I cannot believe you almost dated her," I scoffed, wrinkling my nose at him.

"Lauren is a bit intense, sure, but she's very nice. Once you get to know her," he protested. He circled my body with his arms and cleared his throat. "Actually. That reminds me of something I wanted to talk to you about."

"Yes?" I asked, settling my hands on his hips.

"Well, I think this is the perfect time for us to see other people," Logan smiled, kissing my cheek. "You've been great, Mary Anne, really, but high school's over. It's time for us to be grown ups, right? Find who we were meant to be with, you know?"

"What?" I gasped, digging my fingers into the slick of his graduation gown. "Logan, no, what are you talking about? I love you, we're so good together, why would you want to give this up?"

"Oh, you're really neat, Mary Anne," he said, nodding his head. "Sweet and smart and all. And you're a terrific fuck, really you are, I've told all the guys that you give great head, but I just can't limit myself. There are three hundred million people in the US of A, May, and half of them are women. Did you really think that I'd actually want to stay with you forever? Oh, wow, pretty girl, there are too many girls out there. No way."

He began striding across the field, shedding his graduation gown and revealing the sky blue jersey and shorts of his college basketball uniform. Logan was walking slowly, but I had to sprint to keep up with him, my pumps sinking and sticking in the turf of the football field, so I kicked them off, chasing after him in my bare feet.

"Logan, wait!" I screamed, grabbing his arm as he left the stadium. "No, don't leave me!"

"But, Mary Anne, you wanted me to go," he frowned.

"No, no, I was wrong," I stammered. "Angel, I love you, please. Just 'cause we're young, that doesn't mean anything."

"Oh, _tesorina_," Logan laughed. "Don't you get it? High school relationships don't last."

I glanced down at my left hand and then thrust it in his face. "Look, look—we're married. It's lasting, we're married," I insisted.

He took my fingers in his hand and puckered his mouth in surprise. "Well, damn." He looked at me and bugged his eyes. "Was I drunk? I mean, married? Huh. Still, this has gotta end, Mary Anne. I guess there's only one other way."

I licked my lips and whispered, "You're going to divorce me?"

Logan reached down and kissed me, tracing the line of my jaw with his fingers. "No, wife. This is how it ends." And he put his hands on my shoulders and shoved.

I screamed as I went plunging beyond the horizon of the ground, down into a shaft of freshly dug soil, down, down, slamming down on the flat bottom of the hole. A hole just slightly shorter than Logan's height. Six feet deep. I brushed bits of earth off of my legs as I stared up at him.

"Sorry, May, my pretty girl, but I got a date," he called, and a girl I recognized from the UNC dance team scooted an arm around his waist. Long legged, long haired, curves that waltzed down her body. The obvious bounce of breasts. She waved down at me, and he blew me a kiss. "It's been real, wife," he smiled. And he left.

Wincing, I curled up into a sit, running my hands over my aching arms. I felt the hot rise of tears laddering up my throat, and I began to hum with a panic. There was the light touch of fingers on my shoulder, winging down on my skin. "May?" a voice murmured.

I whirled my head over to the head of the grave. Barbara was sitting crossed-legged, leaning against the wall of the hole, her graduation gown unzipped to reveal the white dress she wore beneath, the sweetheart neckline showing off the platinum Star of David necklace that her sister had bought her as a gift. Beautiful, whole Barbara. A _People_ magazine was open in her lap. "It's okay, don't be scared. I'm here. And I'm just flabbergasted—dude, Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConnaughey? Wow."

"Babs?" I whimpered. "Babs, we have to get out of here."

She dropped the magazine and put her arms around me. I breathed in the deep scent of strawberries, that blushing scent that clung to her hair. "Oh, Maybelle. I miss you so much. I'm going to take care of you, don't worry."

Large hurls of dirt began raining on us. I looked up at Kristy and Claudia and Stacey and Dawn and Mallory and Jessi; my father and Sharon; Jeff; Erin and Jeremy; Kathleen and Sean and Dana and Allison from Yale; Emily and Miranda; Logan. All of them with shovels, dumping load after load of soil on top of Barbara and me.

"Make them stop!" I shrieked, "I can't breathe!" I covered my mouth and tried to grasp clean breaths, but the dirt was pounding into my mouth, crowding into my lungs and mudding everything inside of me. Barbara and I were shoulder deep in dirt, and I looked up again at the tornado of black before hurling my desperate gaze back on Barbara.

The dirt had reached the large metal spike lodged in her throat. Her charred lips opened, crackling the burnt skin on her cheeks. "You don't need to breathe," she said.

I screamed so loud that I began to cough, choking on the dirt, choking on my terror. I coughed so hard that my eyes flew open, and I whirled right out of my nightmare, rolling away from my sleeping sister and flinging my legs on the floor. I clapped my hands over my mouth and hacked, spitting a little at the end of the gasps. When I pulled my hands back, they were drenched in a cherry-bright blood.

And I was still choking.

I reached back and clutched my sister's arm with my red-stained hand, shaking her as hard as I could, coughing, coughing, how was I not waking up the world with my coughing? Her eyes opened, blinking rapidly to bring me into focus, and then she let out a loud yell as she whipped upright.

"Stacey!" she shrilled, grabbing me by the shoulders. "Stacey, Stacey!" Her voice lowered a bit, and she said to me, "Stay here, I'm going to go get a towel." She ran into the bathroom, her shoulders tightening as I kept up the choking gasps, blood rivering out of my mouth and onto the white sheaf of my gown. This negligee had taken Logan's breath away, just like we thought.

And then I sent him away. Come back, _come back_ to me. Because I could go.

Dawn came running out of the bathroom as Jeff flung the other bedroom door open. "What's wrong?" he asked, peering into my room.

"Go downstairs, get Stacey," Dawn barked. "Kerry's probably still sleeping, too, get her. And grab May's cell phone and her day planner—they're down in the kitchen."

Jeff nodded, bounding down the stairs. He banged on the door to the study before running in; I lost the sound of him under my coughs. My chest was beginning to iron over, growing too tight for breath and movement and anything other than the blood. I was panting in air, but it seemed to stick in my throat. Dawn held the towel under my mouth, wiping my neck and face and catching each mouthful of the foamy blood as I spewed it out.

Dawn pulled out her cell phone and glanced up at me. "What's the area code here? 919?" I managed a nod, and she punched in six numbers, waiting for a moment before yelping, "Um, my sister's bleeding. From her mouth? She keeps coughing and coughing, and blood is just gushing out of her mouth. She has cancer? A tumor in her—" She looked at me, and I tapped the right side of my chest before spitting another mouthful of blood onto the towel. "In her right lung, and I think it's, like maybe ruptured, and you have to send an ambulance right away because she sounds like she's choking, and I don't know what to do."

Three sets of feet stormed up the stairs. Stacey ran to the bed and climbed up next to me as Jeff and Kerry huddled back by the television. Jeff opened up my day planner and flipped my cell phone open. "We need to call Logan," he said, smacking through the pages. "Logan—is supposed to be home right now. It says he leaves for work at ten. Where is he, Mary Anne?"

"They had a fight," Dawn snapped, covering the receiver for a moment. "Just call him, he's gotta have his cell on." She listened to the phone for a moment and then looked at Stacey. "Keep her upright, they said. Hold her from behind, just in case she passes out."

"Okay, May, let's snuggle," Stacey said, hooking me around the shoulders and sliding her body against mine. "Just don't panic, okay? We're getting help, it's gonna be here in a second."

Kerry stood up, her whole body shaking. "I'll go stand outside, wait for the ambulance," she offered, waiting for Dawn to wave her away. Jeff's hand trailed down her back, and she gave him a crushing hug before dashing out the door.

Jeff snapped my phone shut. "He's not answering," he stated.

"Call again, leave a voicemail, and then keep calling over and over. Wait. Use your phone—maybe he's just avoiding May's calls," Dawn suggested.

My breath tripped over a whimper of tears, and Stacey rubbed my arms. "Hey, it's okay, it's okay," Stacey murmured, kissing the back of my head. "Why would he be avoiding May? A fight?"

"I heard them screaming at each other last night—I'm not really sure about what. He left after midnight, and I slept in here," Dawn supplied. She startled a bit. "Oh, no, ma'am, I'm sorry. Um, she's still just coughing. What else can we do?"

The coughing was coming out in a harsh, barking way, and I sagged against Stacey as the room began to spin. Jeff, clutching at a phone; Dawn, clutching at a phone; Stacey, clutching at me. We were all holding something, weren't we. I stared at them all—they were holding secrets, too. How much room could they have to hold everything?

Dawn began to bite her nails. "Stace?" she whispered.

Stacey reached a hand past me and took Dawn's fingers, squeezing them tight. "It's gonna be okay, Sunshine. How much longer until the ambulance gets here?"

"Three minutes, maybe less," Dawn mumbled. She glanced over at Jeff. "Anything?"

"It clicks over to voicemail after the first ring. He's got his phone off. Damn it, why would he be so stupid?" Jeff seethed. "Mary Anne is _sick_, we all gotta be prepared." He shook his head and started dialing again. "I'm calling Mom."

"Here, give me May's phone. I'm gonna get a hold of her friend Erin. Maybe Erin knows where Logan would be hiding," Stacey said, snapping her fingers. She started searching through my phone's address book and added, "Then, we should call Randa and Emmy. You want me to call them first, May?"

I shook my head. _Find him_, I mouthed, my head whirling around in fatigue, Stacey nodded, holding the phone to her ear. "Hey, Erin? This is May's friend, Stacey...Yeah, it's nice to talk to you, too, but listen. May's really sick, she's coughing up blood—no, don't freak, just _listen_ to me. We can't find Logan, do you have any idea where he could be…Okay, thanks…Sure, as soon as we know. Thanks again—bye."

Stacey hit the end button and said to Dawn, "She's calling his friend Shawn? And she said she'll meet us at whatever hospital that they take us to. We should see if they'll take us to the Duke hospital."

"Are you allowed to ask like that?" Dawn replied, wiping my mouth off as I spit another bit of blood.

Stacey shrugged. "My dad did once in New York, but I wasn't, like, severe. That was the freshman year thing."

"Oh, God, you scared the shit outta me then," Dawn muttered, shaking her head. "'Dawnie? Hey, it's me! I just ordered a shitload of stuff from the Bloomie's catalogue! I'm also in the hospital 'cause I passed out at dinner. So, like, call me!'"

Giggling, Stacey said, "Yeah, maybe that was a bit too flip, huh?"

A cough turned into a gag, and I began clawing at my throat, spluttering on a clot of blood that had blocked its way out of my body. I couldn't breathe, I could _not breathe_, flailing my arms and stripping at my skin. Stacey bolted my arms against my body, leaning me forward so Dawn could pound on the back of my chest. I pitched forward and vomited out the blood; it fizzed down my gown, the acid of it snaking into my nose and needling at my energy.

I just wanted to sleep. This was so hard, I just wanted to sleep here in Stacey's warm arms. I slacked back against her body. I heard Stacey say my name, Dawn and Jeff, all of them yelling my name. My hands limped onto my belly and covered the mound of my skin. As if I could shelter them. Let this happen to me, leave them be.

Both of them.

Like waves, the air around me crashed into my body, weighing me down. I swayed for a moment and then my limbs went loose, and I fell down into something like sleep.

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The sound of the ocean fuzzed all around me like static on the radio. I blinked against the too-bright sunlight, the yellow blaze of it hazing everything, making objects steam and squiggle in the heat. Raising a hand over my eyes, I shielded a bit of the light and narrowed my eyes at the four people on the beach. Three stretched out on towels, one sitting in a beach chair.

I took a few steps towards them, and one of the two girls propped herself up on her elbows. "Hey, Mary Anne!" she called, waving me to them.

"We call her May, actually," the other girl said, turning over onto her stomach. "Mary Anne? M.A.? Get it? May?"

"Oh, that's cute," the first girl giggled, tugging her brown hair tighter in its ponytail. "I always thought you needed a nickname. If we had been friends, I probably would have started calling you Mary or maybe, like, Annie. Babs used to call me 'Amy' a lot? Though after I read _The Princess Diaries_, I wished my nickname was Mia. Mia from my name is so pretty, don't you think?"

I licked my lips, standing over them now. "Hi, Amelia."

"Hey, Maybelle," Barbara smiled, tugging on the hem of my gown. "This is gorge, babe."

"Thank you," I murmured, sinking down on the sand next to her. She straightened up into a sit, tugging on her bikini top before wrapping me in her arms, rocking us for a long time. "I missed you, Babsie."

"I know," she whispered, touching my cheek. "It's been a long time. I think? I don't know. It's hard to know."

"Time," the other person snorted. He whipped his long body up into a sit. "It's a bloody bother. I'm rather chuffed about the whole nonsense of human bondage: time. Monogamy. All rubbish."

My breath stuck in my throat like tape. "Tim," I gasped, reaching out over Amelia to touch his arms. "Tim! How are you!"

"Fantabulous, woof!" he grinned. "Death, it's the true adventure, yeah, don't know why I fought so hard against it. I'm having a right awesome time, meeting new people, going to new places, working on my tan. Eh, Amelia? I look quite fit?"

"Mmm," Amelia murmured, rolling her eyes. She glanced at me and mouthed, _Horn dog_.

"I saw that," he snapped. "You were friends with Miranda? How in sodding hell did that work? Randa was easy breezy—you, my dear, have a stick up your ass."

"Can he go now?" Amelia whined. "Things were so much nicer without _him_."

"Kids, stop fighting," the woman on the beach chair chided. "Mary Anne doesn't need your bickering right now. Tim, behave. Amelia, just remember that he's a boy, and boys are to be tolerated. Now, my sweet girl, come on over and give me a kiss," the woman said, opening her arms to me.

I stood up and lurched over into my mother's arms. "Mommy, I'm scared," I cried, tucking into her lap.

The thin bones of her hands moved over my hair. "Don't be scared. Just rest."

I laid my head on her shoulder and looked back at my friends. Amelia looked so young, small, with her pinched face and large green eyes. She looked the same as she did in our last English group meeting: she looked thirteen. So young next to Barbara, the way that Mallory and Jessi did in the shadow of the older members of the BSC. The girls were bending their heads together and giggling, Barbara's curls brushing over Amelia's glossy brown tail. Tim was picking at a patch of flaking skin on his arm, but he smiled at me, adjusting his sunglasses before stretching back out, his body as ropy as a fawn's. Healthy, all of them so healthy, glowing in the smack of the sun.

I curled my legs up, and something caught my eye, the somethings under my clean, bloodless gown. The flatness of my stomach hiding under the curve of my breasts. How we are changed back to how we want to be. Here, we are our most beautiful, aren't we. I stared at my mother, at her smooth face. I had seen a photo of her in her last months, tucked in my grandmother's nightstand back in Iowa. Mom looked punched, her eyes bruised and hollow, her cheeks canyoned with emaciation. Cancer was killing her. It was clear, the ringing bell of her features.

Not in my eyes, though. In my eyes, here, she was lovely. She looked so much like me—me, her daughter, her shadow. A mirror that send my father over his sanity every time he stared at me and into my cancer and only reflecting back _her. _Her. Only five years older than me now.

Mom pulled me closer to her and began humming a lullaby, pushing my hair back. Under her hands, it grew straight and long, tumbling down to cover my restored chest. "This is how long it would have been, had you not lost it before," Barbara explained, calling out over the surf.

"It's very cute," Amelia said. "Though I do love the curls."

"It can be however you want it to be," Mom smiled, ringing her fingers over my face. "Don't worry."

"Is it all over?" I trembled. "Am I dead?"

Barbara smiled at me. "No, May. Your body is just being devoured by the cancer. It needs some time to heal. And you're here—well, you're here opposed to somewhere else for another reason. So you get to spend time with us. Come on, stretch out, take a nap. Here, you don't burn, not even you, so c'm'ere," she cajoled, patting the sand. Amelia scrambled up and spread out another towel. Mom gave me a gentle nudge, and I walked back over to my friends.

"Can I ask you questions?" I said, settling down between them.

Tim clucked his tongue, lazing his hands behind his head. "Nope, sorry, love. You can be with us, but you can't know nothin'."

"I hate not knowing," I grumbled, and Barbara began to laugh. She took my hands, stroking my fingers with her own as her dark brown eyes melted deep into me. "Babsie, what's going to happen to me?"

"I'm going to take care of you. Just take a nice, long rest, and I'll watch over you," she smiled, kissing my forehead. I closed my eyes, pulled out like the tide into a sleep where the sounds of her voice, my mother's voice, my friends' constant murmuring moved me back and forth like a cradle.

Cradle. Baby. I opened my eyes at the sound of a baby's cry.

My head was sticky and heavy, and I moved it so slow in the molasses of the heat-thick air. In my mother's arms was a baby, its arms raising with fists and batting her cheeks with mellow impact. Mom beamed at it, nuzzling her nose in its stomach and cooing soft words into the soft of its belly. This is what she looked like with me. Me, the reason why she didn't fight to live. Because she wanted to spend time with her baby.

And she died.

"Not me, I won't let it be me," I whispered, staring up at the cloudless sky. A July sky, piercing blue. Blue like gemstones to be worn around necks in a sign of love. Blue like eyes. "You were right, angel. No dying. I won't let it be me, I promise."

I crawled onto my hands and knees, moving from my friends towards my mother. "Is that your baby, Mom? Is that me?" I whispered, coming to her side.

Mom handed me the baby, and I gathered the small bundle into my own arms, holding it close to my heart. My fingers touched the soft down of its hair, a color like the beach that spread from forehead to the soft lump of the back of the head. Arms and legs, chubbed with its baby fat, squishy like down pillows. I held a wrist in my index finger, curling it around like a bracelet and letting the gentle warmth of that baby's skin bleed into me. I touched every inch, every small toe with a tiny shine of nails, every bean-thin finger. When it moved its legs, I saw—it was a boy.

Not me.

"Mine," I inhaled. "This is my baby."

Barbara came over and weighted her head on my shoulder. "He's beautiful, Mary Anne. He looks like you—right there, right in the mouth? And the eyes. Oh, God, he's you, Maybelle."

"He's perfect," I said, I ached, touching every inch of him. "He's so perfect. Is he my match baby? Mom? Is he?"

She reached a hand and set it on my head. "He can't be, Mary Anne."

Because he was here.

My mouth bit hard on my scream. All it did was move, chewing on a sound that wouldn't come out. Nothing would come out, it just baked deep in my chest and burned a hole in my heart. My broken heart. My eyes clenched shut, boiling out tears over and over, but no sound would come. I was sound, why was I so silent? I was holding a baby that was mine but would never _be_. This silence—was that the sound of a breaking heart?

When my heart stopped, I was slammed down without a word. Maybe.

I slagged down on my bones and wept those quiet tears onto my baby as Barbara ran her hands down my hair, tugging on the ends. She wiped my cheeks and rubbed the baby's face with her wet fingers. Meeting my eyes, she told me, "He never hurt, May. He never, ever hurt. You took such good care of him. He knows he was loved."

Caving over him, I made a shelter out of my body, hiding him deep against my smooth plane of a belly. The place that was supposed to be his safe home. Where he was supposed to be for so many more months. _I'm sorry, I'm sorry_, my blood sang.

"You don't need to be forgiven, sweet girl," my mother promised, still stroking my head. "You don't need to be forgiven at all. This is not your fault."

I sniffed, rubbing the back of my hand over my eyes. "What about the other baby?"

"I can't tell you," Barbara sighed. She bit her lip. "May, we have to go now. You stay and sleep as long as you want, get nice and warm, okay, but we have to go."

"No," I wailed, wrapping my free hand in her hair. "No, don't leave me."

She sniffed, pitching her eyes skyward. "Oh, come on, _sosia_. Don't make me cry, okay? I love you so much, this blows. Or, as Randa would say, this defies physical logic by both sucking _and_ blowing all at once." We let out a weak laugh as Barbara's arms slid in concert with mine, shifting the baby away from me. "I love you. And we'll take good care of him."

"What? Babs, don't!" I screamed, grabbing at her legs as she stood up. "No, Babsie, please, don't go—don't take him, please, no, no, let me stay with him, please, let me have my baby, please." I moved onto my knees and draped myself on her rising body. "I'll do anything, don't, Barbara, _don't_!"

My mother stood with my best friend, reaching down to kiss my head. "It's okay, my love. He's with us, it's okay. I'll be with you, always, you know that."

"_Mom!_" I bellowed, trying to get to my feet, but I was still slack with the sleep. Still too foggy to move fast. Amelia and Tim were making their way to the ocean, tossing me waves of farewell as they stepped into the surf.

"We'll see you soon," Amelia called, blowing me a kiss. "Take care of yourself—go live, Mary—_May_."

"Woof!" Tim boomed, raising his fist as he took a running dive into the water. "Give my love to Randa, yeah? And tell Boyfriend that I'm proud of him for sticking! Kid's a freak show, no doubt!" He slapped his face. "It's cold today, bollocks to that, eh?"

"Oh, sack it up—think of King and Country and just go down," Amelia snapped, holding her nose and ducking under the surface.

Barbara was rocking my baby back and forth as she approached the water. "Your Auntie Babsie is going to take you for a swim, huh, sweetheart?" She glanced back at me, touching the baby's head and then her heart before drifting into the water.

"Mom," I sobbed, scrambling as fast as I could to her before she could swim from me, too. "Mommy, please."

"Just rest," she told me, pointing at the towels. "This isn't your time."

"Is my time coming?" I begged. "I need to know. The cancer. The other baby. What's going to happen?"

"Go live," she said, gathering her dark blue dress up so the hem wouldn't catch in the water bubbling amongst her ankles. She shaped her mouth in a kiss and then broke into a run, smashing into the waves and then plunging away. I blinked, staring at her disappearing feet, and I realized: they were all gone.

My Babsie. My baby. I had been broken open, and my baby was gone.

I pressed my hands to my belly and began to howl, grinding my forehead into the sharp sand. I wanted to be shredded, I wanted to be ripped _down_. I wanted to go as low as I could and never get up again. My baby was dead, and it was my fault. My baby was gone, and I could not follow.

I could not follow _yet_.

My fingers stretched an inch from the water, but they didn't get wet, no matter how much I willed them to. I heard my name on the current, my name in a slow, Southern way, a low voice like a surprise hot wind in November, insisting its way through the town and billowing skirts with the teasing curl of itself. Low and hot and sweet like honey. My name rose out of the water on that voice and pulled me up to my feet. I turned around in a circle, trying to find it, trying to find where it was leading me.

Heavy like lead, my eyelids began to drop. The voice had a soporific effect, guiding me to the towels. I stretched out my body, my oh so dry body, now empty of that baby, now full with parts that didn't belong instead of one that _did_, and I bore my eyes into that blue sky for as long as I could, staring up at the stretch of the sky's iris-like stretch, and I waited for what would bring me home.


	15. Chapter 13, Part II: Him

Power of attorney. It authorizes one person to act on another's behalf. To make decisions.

To speak for them when their voice is lost.

I stared at the medical forms and took the pen from the doctor. I signed the release. I gave permission. I spoke for Mary Anne.

Her life, her story. But now, in my voice.

I signed the forms and shut my eyes and hoped that I had said the right thing.

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Last night, I had stopped in the study and settled down next to my sister, tugging out one of the earpieces on her iPod. "Hey, Kay," I smiled. "Ready for the meet?"

"I'm gonna own all their asses," she declared, punching the air with her fist before stuffing it in front of her yawn. "Are you going to come with me and Pierce to Huntersville on Sunday? For the camp? Mom said you were still thinking about it. I mean, I have my own hotel room with a second bed—I'd love it if you came," she added.

"Huntersville? Bird, that's two and a half hours from here. _And_ it's a total crap town, what would I do all day? Watch you boss around eight and nine year olds?" I frowned.

"I get a whistle," she beamed. "I'm totally pumped." She fingered the hem of the blanket and glanced up at me. "Jeff has been hitting on me all friggin' day."

"Yeah? Is that good or bad?" I asked, pulling my right arm across my chest and squeezing my shoulder into a stretch. Out of habit. A reflex born of stretching like this for months, testing its mobility. Hoping it would come back to how it was, unbroken and ready to move.

She folded her mouth in thought. "Both. Bad because he comes on wa-ay-ay too strong. And I don't want to get involved with him at all. But. Good because it's nice to feel wanted, I guess. Most guys get a bit—"

"Terrified?" I teased.

"I was going to say _intimidated_," Kerry supplied, narrowing her eyes at me. "But at the game? He really just opened up to me, he really showed a lot of vulnerability, like he was a normal person and not just Hormone Central…did you know that his dad and stepmom are having problems?"

"No, I didn't," I said, dropping my arm down. "Is that why he came here?"

Kerry nodded. "His stepmom's been cheating on his dad—and Jeff caught her. So he kinda freaked and changed his ticket to here since he was scared he'd spill the beans to his mom. I don't know, Dawn's been telling him to keep it secret."

"Dawn loves secrets," I mumbled, threading my fingers together. "Drives Mary Anne nuts."

"I told Jeff that he should talk to his mom. Don't you think? He really, _really_ respects you. You should talk to him," Kerry urged. "I bet he'll open up to you if you ask. I bet it would help him—Mary Anne said he's been a jerk? I mean, how nice would you be if you caught your stepmom screwing your little sister's piano teacher? On the piano?"

My eyes popped. "Wow. That takes a bit of coordination."

"Ew!" Kerry squealed. "Lo, don't ever go there again! God!"

I grinned, ticking her side. "Get to bed, Miss Gold Medal. What is it that Pierce says? The road to 2012 begins _now_." I pounded my fist on the air mattress and squinted at her. "He knows that y'all are moving, right?"

"Yeah. He's depressed, but Karen Brewer isn't a bad diver. He'll just pour all of his time and ego into her." Kerry shrugged, settling back on her pillow. "Karen can be princess of Connecticut diving, and I'll send her a postcard from Worlds."

"_Alladola_, be nice," I warned, leaning over to kiss her forehead. "You can be a killer and still be kind."

"Yeah, I'll call you before a game and see how kind _you_ are about the opposing point guard," she grinned. "Go to your wife, Lo. Ask her about the doctor."

"Can I get a hint?" I whispered. "Is it bad?"

"She has to tell you," Kerry whispered back. "I love you, though."

"I love you, sis," I replied, whipping the earpiece at her nose. "Go to bed. Dream of victory."

And I went upstairs where my wife was sleeping. Then she woke. And it happened. Mary Anne and I hadn't fought in years, hadn't screamed at each other like that, words vicious and digging under my skin. The ache of her anger. She promised me _no dying_. She looked me in the eyes and asked me to marry her, and all I asked was for her not to die. I joked, I said don't die before I can drink, but I meant, Don't die _ever_. She had asked, and I had asked, and she promised me.

And there she was, balled on the bed and shouting at me that she would do what she wanted, be a mother, no matter what it meant. Her health, her life. My life.

My life was my wife.

All I could hear was Mary Anne and her screams to _get out, get out_.

I did. I got in my car and circled around the city, dipping into Durham and driving through her campus, staring those buildings that gave her so much energy and comfort. Buildings that made my skin crawl with their solemn, closed stones. I looped around Raleigh twice; I drove by the cathedral where Yelena had been married, the hotel where Dr. Paves and I had eaten lunch together. Where she told me, _Mary Anne is going to devolve. Count on it. When she melts down, don't give in to her. You can't let her have her way, Logan. Do what you need to do to stay strong, and don't give in to that urge to coddle her. _

Do what you need. I need her. How do I do that?

I drove in circles for hours until I pulled into the parking lot of the basketball arena. I used my key to go inside, and I curled up on the therapy table in the locker room. Here, they had spread out my body months ago, while it was radiating with an evil pain that began at the ripped ribbons of my shoulder tendons. Why didn't I cry once that night? Not once, not even when Mary Anne arrived at the hospital and laid her head on my stomach and promised me that I would get through this. _We_ would get through this.

That I would grow stronger. Hungrier. Better.

All on the court. All where that belonged. Here, here I was so soft, weak. I was a guy who would climb onto a padded table in the middle of a humid summer night and use his warm-up jacket as a blanket. And cry.

Because she'd rather die. How do you wipe the sickness from her eyes, make her see? My Mary Anne, she understood: no dying. This Mary Anne, this sad and tired thing, she was losing that. We needed to get to a good day. How do I get her to a good day?

I tucked my hands behind my head and forced myself to sleep.

There was a bang, and the locker room flooded with light. "Lo? You in here?" a voice yelled. I sat up and rubbed at my eyes; I grabbed my phone to check the time—no signal. Of course not, not in the concrete den of this room. I squinted at my watch—almost nine. _Crap_. I had to be at work at ten. I had my sister's teeth to clean at ten, Dawn at eleven. This left me with no time to make things right with Mary Anne. _Crap_.

"Shawn?" I yawned, scooting off the table. "I'm in here."

Keshawn came barreling through the room, grabbing my arm and yanking me in his wake. "You are so fucking queer sometimes. You could have come to my place, you know."

"I didn't want to bug you at three in the morning," I said, digging in my heels. "What's going on? Wait—Jesus, _stop_, what's going on?"

"I've been searching for your ass everywhere, we've lost way too much time," he growled, running us into the hallway. He was so much taller than me, so much stronger, I could barely fight him into a slower pace. "They had to take your girl to the hospital, come on, move!"

"What?" I yelled, wrenching my arm back. "Who's they? What happened!"

"Her sister and the rest of the batshit brigade at your house. Erin called, said that Mary Anne's coughing up blood or some shit, they're taking her over to Duke. I called her again, she said that May passed out from all of the blood loss—she said it was a hemorrhage? I have to get you to Mary Anne, come on, let's go."

When his hand clamped down on my arm, this time I ran with him, slamming through the side doors to get to his car. I tried to open the passenger's door twice before my hand calmed enough to hold the handle, to lift it up. Focus. Bear down. You can do this.

You have to, for her. Because you weren't there when she needed you.

This is my fault.

"She kicked me out last night—we had a horrible fight. She wants to be a mother so bad, she's willing to sacrifice everything. She might develop this condition that leads to seizures and heart attack and coma and death, but it doesn't matter to her. She wants to be a mother," I babbled, burying my face in my hands as he pulled us back onto the road. "She promised me no dying, how can she change her mind?"

"The girl is so depressed, she's lower than dirt," Keshawn sighed. "You can't listen to her—don't let her get to you. I mean, you said it yourself. When May's depressed, she says shit that she takes back the moment she gets her head back on. She wants to live, you know that, she'll realize what she has to do."

I balled my fingers down into my palm, and I banged those fists against the glove box. "Damn it, I wasn't there!" I shouted. "What if she's dead? What if something horrible has happened? I told her, this is—why did I listen to her last night? I gave in, I gave in, and I'm not supposed to give in to her." I kept punching the hard plastic of the dashboard over and over until my knuckles splintered, the fine puncture of blood rising out of my skin. It didn't hurt, though.

I wanted it to. I needed it to hurt. Hurt me like I've hurt her.

"Will you stop it?" he snapped. "You act as though she's blameless."

"She's sick," I seethed. "It's not her fault."

"Well, then, it's not yours, either," he shot back. "No one died and made you Jesus, dude. You're not superhuman and perfect, and all, all wonderful, you know? Stop beating yourself up, for the love of God. You look ready to flog yourself with a whip."

There was a dull ache in the back of my thigh. Phantom pain. Mary Anne had me rub my thumbs in the flat plane of her chest, her face wrinkling at the pain of those breasts that weren't there. _It aches_, she whimpered. _Make it stop, angel, please_.

I bore my fingers into her skin and massaged circles into the scars that crossed her chest. _Harder_, she would say, _it won't hurt me_. Her eyes would close, and her head would turn, and she would cry over all she had lost.

My Mary Anne wasn't a crier. How do we get to the good days?

Keshawn thundered the car into the circular drive in front of the hospital, and I ran to the doors, bolting to the elevators before I realized: I had no clue where she was. Not oncology. Where? I grabbed my phone and called Dawn, staring at the metal faces of the seven elevator doors staring back at me. Mocking me. _Don't you know where your wife is?_ their steel teeth said. _You've failed her_.

"Why didn't you answer us?" Dawn wailed in an answer.

"My phone wasn't working—where are you?" I demanded. "I'm at the hospital, where are you?"

"The ER 'cause they're draining all of the blood? But Mary Anne needs surgery, you have to get here, okay?" she stated, her voice shaking.

I ran again, darting down the spider-leg corridor that led to the ER, I skidded into the lobby and nearly smacked right in to Kerry.

She whirled her arms around my neck, clenching me tight. "You spent the night at the arena?" she mumbled into my ear.

"How did you—oh, he called and said my car was there, didn't he," I sighed, squeezing her so hard that the bones in her back popped. "How is she?"

Kerry pulled back from me and shrugged. "Okay, I guess. She passed out on the bed, and they put a tube in her to help her breathe—with that bag that they squeeze," she explained, opening and closing her fist in demonstration. "And now they won't tell us anything."

Her hand lifted, pointing at the doors where Dawn and Stacey were, their arms knotted around each other, Stacey brushing Dawn's hair back as my wife's sister cried. They had been fighting so cruelly for weeks now. All they needed to come back together was Mary Anne, the gush of her blood over their hands. Was everything forgiven now?

Mary Anne hated their secrets. Something had made Stacey so angry that her face purpled at the idea of Dawn. Something that they hadn't told us. I said to Mary Anne that it wasn't our business, that we didn't have to know. And Mary Anne had grumped, _I hate not knowing_. I stared at her sister and her sister's best friend, holding each other, and I wanted to know. I did.

But I ducked my head away. Not now.

"You need to go to your meet," I said, tugging on her braid.

Kerry snorted. "No way. I'm not leaving you." She wound her hand in mine. "I called Mom and Dad—they're looking at houses right now? And Mom said for me to stay with you."

"And Dad told you to go to the meet," I supplied, rolling my eyes. "Kay, he's right. Mary Anne's gonna be just fine, and then she'll be all bummed that you didn't dive. And you know Mary Anne, she's almost as good as me about feeling guilty." I tightened my hand around hers and said, "Kerry. Go."

She chewed her lip, grabbing at her hair and snagging the elastic band off the tail of her braid. "I bet Jeff would go with me," she hesitated.

"How bout this. Shawn's parking his car—you can stay until eleven, and then he'll take you and Jeff to the pool. I bet he'll stay, too. I mean, he's always wanted to see you dive, and I'm pretty sure his plans for today were nap, play Xbox, and screw around with his fantasy baseball team since mine is kicking his ass," I told her, shaking the river of her gold waves.

Kerry giggled. "_My_ fantasy team is kicking his ass. How dumb is he—who takes the Philly's pitching staff?"

"That's what I said. It's why I lifted the A's rotation wholesale," I nodded. I folded back down on her for a hug. "You promise me you'll go?"

"Fine," she huffed. "You're such an ass, you know that?"

"Does anyone around here love me?" I whined, drooping down.

She blinked. "Sure. Mary Anne. It's why we can all get away with teasing you so much—she's way too nice to you."

"Thank God," I muttered, ruffling her hair. "I'm gonna go find a doctor, see what's going on."

"I'm going to go get Jeff—he went to the cafeteria to get us all a bit of breakfast," Kerry replied, giving my hand one last pump before walking away from me. I turned around and walked to Stacey and Dawn.

They didn't break from each other when they turned their faces to me. "You have to go in there," Dawn demanded. "Get them to tell us what's going on."

"She just passed out, right in my arms. She just kept coughing up blood. There was so much blood," Stacey murmured, dipping her head on Dawn's shoulder.

I shuddered. "But she's okay?"

"We don't know," Dawn shook, and her eyes welled up with tears. So much like Mary Anne. "They won't tell us anything, Logan. You have to make them tell us."

So I pushed the doors open, walking to the other side. Once, I had carried Mary Anne into an ER, had come into a room just like this where a nurse put a hand on my chest and said, _Who are you?_

_I'm her boyfriend_, I said. So proud. I was Mary Anne Spier's boyfriend. Could I skywrite that? Could you see it on my skin, that I was hers?

The moment those words went past my mouth, though, the nurse pushed me back. _Family only_. And I was just the boyfriend. Just the high school boyfriend. And guys like me belonged on the other side of the doors.

This is why I married her, no questions, no hesitations. I wanted to follow her. And a husband could.

I walked right up to her feet and stared down the silent plank of my wife. She was naked except for her underwear—the gown she was wearing the night before, that incredible white gown, it was gone. Where? I pictured the white satin covered in blood and swallowed back a mouthful of acid. On the right side of her chest, a tube was running out of her body right under her armpit. The catheter that slung out of the center of her torso was hooked to an IV, and I looked up from there and checked her mouth—empty. No tubes. I sighed with relief as I took her feet in my hands, rubbing my fingers over her toes.

"I'm her husband," I blurted out, and the doctors and nurses all looked at me. One man came over, tugging the rubber gloves on his hands off, tossing them to the garbage. He missed.

I winced. I had an urge to rebound them into the trash for him, but I held onto Mary Anne instead.

"You know she's pregnant," I told him, staring at her. Staring down at her.

"We know—her brother and sister have been like a Greek chorus: 'She's pregnant, she's allergic to aspirin. She's pregnant, she's allergic to aspirin,'" he said, waving his hands back and forth. "We have her emergency cards, we know everything."

The skin under her mouth was red and caked, a brown crust forming on her lips. "Is she okay?" I asked.

"She's doing just fine," the doctor said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "The tumor on her lung ruptured blood vessels. That was the source of the bleeding, and the pressure of the blood collapsed her lung. So. We cleared the airways, reinflated the lung, she's stable, but we have to get her in to surgery," he said, looking at me over the top of his glasses. "We're just waiting for an OR to open up. But, there are some risks, and we need you to sign for it."

I took her right foot in my hand and began rubbing it—her skin was so cold. Ice in my hands. "Is she awake at all?"

"No, but she could come to," the doctor shrugged. I put her foot back down and slid past two nurses to squat down by her head. I cradled her face, touching her chin with my thumbs. "Mr. Spier, we need to talk about surgery."

I let out a small laugh. "Spier is her last name. Mr. Spier is her dad." Her dad. What would he do? He would do what he always did: melt away. When Mary Anne was in the ER at Yale, her restarted heart chugging so slow back to life, but her body jammed full of tubes, Richard had screamed. When the Yale doctors said Mary Anne was terminal, he ran away. Richard would strip away and fail her. Richard would abandon her.

Richard would call her Alma.

But I was not Mr. Spier.

This is why she married _me_.

"Hey, pretty girl," I whispered, tucking her hair behind her ear. Her face moved, pressing into my hand. My eyes shot up to the doctor. "Do you think she knows I'm here?"

"When she's sleeping, and you crawl in to bed next to her, does she know?" the doctor replied, raising his eyebrows. I grinned, looking back at Mary Anne. Yes, she did, her body cuddling back against mine in a comma shape, moving her hips against my stomach. "So. Surgery."

I nodded. "What's the risk?"

"Well, all surgery and anesthesia carries a risk. However, here—there is a risk of blood clotting and turning into a pulmonary embolism," he began.

I scrambled up to my feet. "No, no, no," I spat. "She had a heart attack that way before. I don't care what you do, don't let that happen. I don't care what it means, not that, no."

The doctor picked up a chart and pulled out several papers. "We'd administer blood thinners to reduce the risk of clotting, but that increases the risk for miscarriage."

"I don't care," I stated, weaving my fingers with her limp right hand. "No heart attacks, no dying." I crouched down next to her ear and whispered, "That's what you want, right? No dying? What happened last night, you still would want to live above anything else. Like you promised, right? Mary Anne? I'm doing right by you, aren't I?"

Nothing. Just the sound of her breathing, the sound of the heart monitor. So strong. Just like her. She'd want this. She would, she would.

I took the papers from the doctor and put them on the bed next to her body. "I love you," I breathed. "I'm here for you just like you were there for me back then, remember? We're gonna get through this, just like back in high school, just like this year with me. I love you, _tesorina_. No dying."

I spoke for her.

I signed.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The room hushed. My coaches stepped outside, bending their heads with the doctors. They all looked the same, they all blurred together into a lump of men with sharp hissing voices, all of those voices saying the same thing.

I was hurt. And it was bad.

I tried to turn to my side—why couldn't I? I needed my glasses, everything was a smear around me. Everything, everything was a lead thing. I could see the air, moving around in little white specks, leaving odd lines criss-crossing around my body, around the entire small box of the hospital room. I looked to my right—at my arm trapped in a metal sling. Oh. That's why I couldn't move.

Morphine was a hell of a drug.

The door exploded open, and Mary Anne burst through. She set her bags on the chair next to the bed and edged against me. Her hands were so warm on my face, I waited for steam to rise. She loved me so much, I could feel it. The heat of peppers, the taste of cinnamon.

"Hey, angel," she smiled, moving her hands over my head. As if she was checking it, making sure that it was perfect. "You fell down and went boom, huh?"

"I voted today," I mumbled. "I was very excited—I voted for president for the very first time. I pulled the lever with my right hand." I flexed the fingers on that hand and winced—there was pain, there was a knife of pain that arched down from my shoulder to those fingers. "I can't pull the lever again."

"Well, maybe that's for the best. Third party candidate," she snorted, winking at me. "Could you throw your vote away any more?"

"My people are due for a revolution," I mumbled. I reached up for her hair, but I missed. I never missed. How could I miss? Did she move? I tried to touch her again, and this time, I saw her wave into my hand. "2008 is our year."

"Only if everyone in America is as high as you are right now," she giggled. "What did they give you, Vicodin?"

I held up the button in my left hand. "Morphine. This stuff rocks. I've been such a bitch about never getting high. This rules, Mary Anne."

"Are you seeing pink elephants yet?" she asked, glancing around the room with narrowed eyes.

I blinked. "Am I supposed to?"

She smiled at me—everything became gold. For a moment, the shadow of ache in my right arm disappeared. "Logan, you're a terrible drug addict. Let's not do this again."

"Okay," I nodded, closing my eyes. Her hand was a clock, ticking over my head, my face, over and over. I just wanted to sleep. I wanted her to curl against me and take me into sleep. But I opened my eyes again. "I asked for them to call you. It was the third thing I said." I raised my fingers. "One. Can I play? Two. Is it bad? Three. Call Mary Anne."

"What are the answers to the first two?" she replied, tracing the bones in my face with her index finger, gentle as a whisper. Gentle as her heart.

I swallowed and looked down at my body. At my jersey. This was only the second game of the season, it was still new. It was still a brand new thing, and I had ruined it by landing wrong. Knocked out of the air and landing with my arm bent back behind my body with two guys from the other team pancaked on top of me. All of the work, all of the work and time, all of it gone in a second.

"I can't play for a long time," I said, slumping against her hand. "They have to operate tomorrow morning. I tore my rotator cuff, it's just—ripped it like it was paper. Just like that. It took me so long to get here, and just like that! Done," I said, opening up the fingers on my left hand and wagging them.

Mary Anne licked her lips. "How long is a long time?"

"Two months. So, not until January. Not until conference play, so just as I'm getting back, the team will be in the most important time. I'll fuck everything up, Mary Anne. I'll lose my spot, they won't give it back to me." I balled my hand into a fist and ground it against my forehead. Stupid _stupid_ me. How could I do this to myself? If only I had moved quicker, if only I had not pushed so hard for an exhibition game, if only, if only—

"You are not going to do this," she snapped, grabbing my chin. "I can see what you're doing, Logan, and you are going to stop it right now. This was an accident, and you couldn't have prevented it more than you could have stopped it from raining this morning." Her fingers dug deep into my skin. "This is going to be hard, angel. This is going to suck and hurt and test you. But you are so strong. And you're going to come back hungrier and better than ever because you're gonna want it more than anyone else out there."

She leaned down and kissed me, her soft lips pressing against my odd rubber-feel mouth. "And I'm going to be there, every day."

"Mary Anne, you have…stuff," I protested, wrapping my hand in her hair. "You have your own deal. I don't—"

She patted her fingers against my nose as if it was a button. "Nope, nope, nope. You were there every day for me back in high school. Even during states, you made time for me. It's my turn now." She drew a line down the rebuilt bridge of my nose and tapped the tip. "I'm here for you now."

"You're always here for me," I mumbled, fisting her curls. She smiled again, and I closed my eyes. "They said that they were going to cut my jersey off. I don't want them to. Can you help me?"

I felt her hands touch my waist, tugging the shirt out of my shorts. Like a comet of heat, her hands moved up my chest, working the jersey up my front and my back. She guided my left arm out of the shirt, and then she snaked it off of my head, kissing my forehead as she passed.

"Okay, I have to work it off the sling now—bear down, angel," she warned. I clenched my eyes tighter and bit down on my lip as her hands touched my shoulder. I wanted to scream as she lifted my arm a fraction of an inch, making the limb move in the socket. I could feel the bitter taste of blood, that smack of metal and salt on my tongue. But I kept biting down on my lower lip as she tugged the fabric down past my elbow, and then in a rush down the rest of my right arm.

"Ta da," she sang, snapping it in the air. "Just perfect, doncha think?"

I was pressing the button for more of the medicine, trying to smile at her even though the pain was swallowing me down, when she began unbuttoning her cardigan. Her eyes never left mine, stringing one of those strange lines between us, as she tossed the sweater over on top of her bags. And over her long sleeved shirt, she pulled on that jersey. Mary Anne had never seen me play, she hated who I was when I played. A mean, angry, insistent guy who never listened to the word _No_. Who always wanted his own way.

But she wore that man's uniform. White, like an angel's dress. Mary Anne always called me _angel_. Nothing else, only my name and _angel_. As if I deserved a name like that. No. She was an angel, there in white and blue. She sat there in the white jersey, the name of my school and the large number ten bold on her chest. Over all of the scars. Over her heart. I sighed, curling my left hand around her waist and pulled her down against me.

"You promise that you'll stay?" I whispered.

"I'll never leave," she replied, drifting her fingers like a breeze over my shredded shoulder. "Never."

- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Mom wants to know if she should fly down," Dawn said, cupping the phone with her hand.

I looked at my watch. Mary Anne had been in surgery for an hour. This was supposed to be easy, supposed to be quick. Why weren't they done yet? "Would Richard be coming with her?"

Dawn brought the phone back to her mouth. "Mom, would you be coming alone?" she asked. After a moment, she looked at me with angry eyes as she mouthed _No_.

"Then she shouldn't. If Sharon comes and Richard doesn't, it will break Mary Anne's heart," I declared, snapping the ratted magazine I had been not really reading against my leg. "What's his excuse?"

"So, what's more important than Mary Anne this time?" Dawn grumbled to her mother. She raised her eyebrows. "Mmm. That's a load of shit, and you know it."

"Lemme guess," Stacey snorted. "Court?" Dawn held out her hand for Stacey to slap. "Do I win a prize?"

"Yeah, the prize is, Don't tell Mary Anne. We'll say that they offered to come, and we said, No thanks, this is no biggie," Dawn retorted. Secrets, secrets. This is how they start.

I pressed my lips together and tightened my fingers around the magazine.

A man in green scrubs came walking up to us. "Spier?" he said, glancing between the three of us and the group of people by the window. They slumped lower while Dawn, Stacey, and I leapt up.

The doctor smiled. "She's in recovery, she's doing great," he announced. "Tumor is out, lung is coming along real nice, really, she's fine. We did take out a second lump growing on the back of her lung—she really needs to begin therapy immediately."

"On Monday," I told him. "She starts then."

"Good. Well. Total success. Y'all can go on down to the recovery ward—it's in the west corridor." He reached forward and shook our hands. I tried not to hug him. I resisted the urge to fall to his feet and thank him. I just held his hand close in mine and let out a loud sigh through my nose.

Dawn, though, leapt against him and made him groan from the impact.

She grabbed my hand. "C'mon, let's go find our girl," she grinned, tugging me out of the waiting room. "Oh, this is awesome. I think we should go get a celebratory ice cream."

"Or, ooh, blueberries," Stacey said, clapping her hands as she skipped next to Dawn. "Blueberries with whipped cream? That's my favorite treat."

"Oreos," I added. "Best. Ever. No, no. Best ever is mint Oreo ice cream. Holy hell, that's the freakin' bomb. There's this ice cream that Mary Anne and I order from Louisville? Or, well, Cincinnati, but whatever—for three months, they have that flavor, and it's, like, a gift from God."

"We should go get May something special," Dawn told Stacey.

Stacey stopped, jerking Dawn to a halt. "We should go home. Clean the bedroom."

I spun around. "Clean the bedroom, wh—oh." She had been bleeding. So much blood. All over her body, all over her gown. All over the bed? I bent down on my knees and covered my face with my hands. I should have _been there_. I should have been the one to hold her, to promise her that it would be okay. Because what if that had been the last time that I had been able to talk to her?

_Get out, get out, get out!_

Why did I listen to her?

I always listened to her, listen listen to all of her good advice, listen listen to all of her sweet words, everything she said that made me laugh. And think. I didn't know how to not listen to her. She was in my blood.

Blood on a bed. Blood on a body.

"Carol's cheating on your dad," I blurted out, staring at Dawn.

Dawn blinked. "What."

"Carol's cheating on your dad," I repeated. "Why didn't you tell us?"

Stacey put her arm around Dawn. "I really don't think that's any of your business."

"Oh, so you two are Friends Forever again?" I smarmed. "Seriously. Jeff comes fleeing to my house, he's a dick to Mary Anne—it would have been nice if someone had told us what was going on. Dawn. He's seventeen. He shouldn't have to keep that a secret, I mean, he's just a kid."

"At seventeen, you were living on your own," Dawn shot back. "You weren't a kid."

"That's different," I protested. "It's so unfair to him! And your mom, I mean, Sharon's so awesome, she'd totally help him out."

"Yeah, she's yank him out of Cali in two seconds—Jeff was miserable in Connecticut," she said, thrusting her hands on her hips. "Mom would tell Dad, Mom would insist Jeff comes home, Jeff has to leave Gracie, Jeff moves an entire continent away from me—do you not get it?"

"No, I guess not," I replied. "I mean, when he first got here? He was such a jerk—"

"Maybe that's because he doesn't like May!" Dawn shouted. "Jesus! Just because you're in love with her doesn't mean the whole world has to be. Lay off my brother, he's allowed to pick and choose his own friends—and don't give me shit about how they're family because I don't see you calling your folks to chit chat. Jeff's been coming through for you and May hard core these past few weeks, he's been stepping up, just leave him alone, okay? His life is hard enough without Mr. Perfect passing judgment."

I looked at Stacey and then down at my hands. "I'm not passing judgment. I just…secrets never end well, Dawn. They never do."

Stacy stiffened next to me. "Well. I think we should go see May." Her arm dropped from Dawn's body. Dawn stared at her and stabbed her hand back in Stacey's; I saw Stacey's fingers turn white from the pressure.

I felt this urge to apologize to Dawn: she was right, not everyone on earth had to be best friends with one another. And Jeff had been nicer to Mary Anne lately, ever since that lunch with Sharon. Still. Secrets, tripping everything up. How could he live with this? I tried to see my mother with another man. Maybe that doctor in Louisville, the neurosurgeon, her old fiancé. Maybe Kerry's dive coach.

Miranda, kissing that senior on the swim team. Miranda, lifting his shirt off of his body the way she would with me, her thumbs drifting, sliding up the sides. Miranda, screwing him and not thinking of me. Or maybe she did, and that made it better for her. Because it wasn't me.

"Why don't you go on in alone. Take a few minutes with her," I offered to Dawn, giving a limp wave of my hand at the recovery room door.

Her eyes beamed. "Really?" She looked at Stacey. "Do you want to come in with me?"

"Nah, go wake May on up with some sisterly affection. And if that doesn't work, threaten her with violence. Like wedgies. And plaid skirts. Those things are a violence towards women," Stacey sniffed, giving Dawn a light shove.

I frowned. "They're what now?" But Dawn yanked the door open, slipping through it as its hinges groaned, swooshing the door back in place.

Stacey turned and gave me a hug. "That was really cool of you. Dawn took this morning really hard, seeing May like that and not being able to help." I closed my eyes and held her tight—it felt nice to be like this. A good guy. Stacey patted my back as if she were comforting a sobbing child. And then she inhaled. "You smell really nice. What is it?"

"Thanks. Some Armani shit," I laughed. "Guess who picked it, huh? One of _tesorina_'s birthday gifts for me, God, last year? Last year." I rolled my eyes. "She makes sure I never run out. It's, like, a total hint, I figure."

"Subtle," Stacey smirked. "I did that to Sam Thomas when we dated, but it was more because I couldn't take that horrific Drakkar Noir crap for one more moment. I miss that. Buying stuff for guys. I spoil my girlfriends like all get out, but it's not the same."

"Are you okay, Stacey?" I asked, putting my hands on her shoulders.

Stacey sighed. "Eh. The fight with Dawn took a lot out of me—I don't like being angry, right? It's not as easy as it used to be, keeping people at arm's length. But, I don't know if I want to forgive her. All I know is, she's scared and sad, and she needs me. And I love her, so I'm gonna be here."

"Well, just so you know, Mary Anne and Dawn plotted this," I confessed. "Yeah, right down to me disappearing? Like, they thought that the only way you'd forgive Dawn was a life or death situation, so…it's all fake blood Mary Anne was coughing up. And all of her doctors? They're in on it, too."

Stacey shoved me. "You are such a tool, honestly." Her hands fell down to her sides, and she stared at the door. Waiting. For what? A sign? Should she forgive? Will Mary Anne live? Open for yes. Open, open, tell us yes.

Nothing.

Dawn came through a minute later, wiping tears from under her eyes. "She's asleep," she sighed. "I even sang to her? I sang that song, you know, the one with the thing that she loves, 'And if I wait too long, how am I ever going to reach my destination.'" Her voice was soft, but it pierced down the hall, that throaty soprano of hers, like it was coming from somewhere deep and then stripped up into a high tone. "'Eyes they open slowly, it's so hard to see. I've never seen an angel, but I'm trying to believe.'"

Laughing, Stacey shoved me forward. "That's your cue, _angel_."

"Yeah, angel," Dawn trilled, bobbling her head.

I glared at the two of them as I opened the door. "Just be aware. I hate you. Both."

"We hate you, too," Stacey grinned, pushing the door closed behind me. It knocked my heels, and I stumbled slightly as I made my way into the large room, bed lined up on each side. With Mary Anne in the middle. My breath leapt into my mouth, and I hurried over to her, settling on the bed and taking her face in my hands. She was asleep, pale and silent. And unbloodied. I moved my thumbs over her shut eyes and leaned forward to kiss her. Kiss her, lips on lips—I wanted her so much, when I closed down my eyes, it felt like the first time. That first time I touched her like this, something that I had been dreaming about from the first day I saw her at SMS.

It took so long. Two days after her thirteenth birthday. Her father was out on a date with Sharon Schafer, and her house was dark. We had come from a movie, our hands linked, fingers in fingers, so close. And she was smiling at me, her face candled with that gorgeous smile. I'm not sure what we talked about—the only thing I can remember saying is when we reached her front door, when I asked, "Can I kiss you?"

"Here?" she giggled, her cheeks turning crimson, glancing up and down Bradford Court. She bit her lip, looking at our hands. "No, wait, come inside."

We moved inside the door, and Mary Anne slipped her jacket off, pulling her hair over her shoulders. She gave her head a shake, and the dim light of the hallway radiated on the gloss of that hair. And she looked at me, her lips slowly closing into a large bloom. Our hands met again, and I bent down and put my lips on the rose of her mouth.

It wasn't long. I stepped back, and Mary Anne's shoulders drooped, her head bobbing as she brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. So red, she was so red, smiling at me. "That was nice," she whispered.

"Just nice?" I teased, and she flushed a near grape shade.

"No, it was _so_ much more than nice, I just—didn't want to—" Her hands were flapping, and I could see a threat of tears in her eyes. She was so sensitive, it was almost unreal. But there was such a sweetness, such a gentleness. I had never met someone so lovely in my life. And I put my hand on her face and kissed her again. Behind her lips, she made a little tweak of noise. I could feel her eyes fluttering for a second before her hand touched my hip, curling fingers against the line of my belt.

When we pulled apart, I saw two tears had leaked out of each eye. I brushed them away. "Happy crying?" I asked, chewing on the inside of my cheek.

That smile again. "Very happy," she beamed. "Can I walk with you to school tomorrow?"

"Just come by my house," I told her, squeezing her hands. I nodded at the door. "I better go."

"Yeah," she sighed, opening up the door. I had my hand on the screen door handle when she grabbed at my wrist, tugging me back. She leaned up on her toes and caught me in one more kiss, a quick brush like wings. My lips were open, about to say goodbye, so I could feel her breath in my mouth, the cinnamon scented air hot over my tongue. She grinned, stepping back and clutching at the heavy door, edging it shut as I walked away. Her fingers curled at me in a wordless goodbye, touching her mouth before she ducked her head and closed the door.

I hadn't even reached the porch steps before I heard her scream and clap her hands, the thump of her jumping up and down. I wanted to get to know _that_ Mary Anne, too.

The secret Mary Anne Spier. The secret life of Mary Anne Spier, a life of energy and confidence and content. The heat under that shy girl. The secret Mary Anne who surfaced and became real when I met her again, years later. That Mary Anne was _my_ Mary Anne.

And she was sleeping. I ran my fingers down to the catheter, hooked to an IV stand next to the bed. The bleeps of the heart machine next to me created an odd concert with her breathing. Her steady breathing out of those battered lungs—the tube sticking out of the side of her chest, feeding into a machine that hummed in a dark voice.

"I'm here, pretty girl," I told her, rubbing her shoulders. "Whenever you wake up, I'm here. And I'll never leave you again, I promise."

I wrapped my arms around her neck and added, "So, no leaving me."

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The orderly helped me out of the wheelchair and into the car, Mary Anne fluttering behind him like a nervous bird. "Don't hurt his shoulder," she reminded,

"Tess," I warned, sliding into the seat.

"Well, he was acting like it was freaking bumper cars with that chair. I wanted to be sure," she replied, jumping into the driver's seat. She rubbed her hands together, getting that evil gleam in her eyes that surfaced whenever she gets behind the wheel of my car. When I bought it off of my grandparents before high school graduation, Mary Anne threw a party. And then swiped the car to take Barbara, Miranda, and Emily to the Dunes up by Providence. There was sand in the engine for weeks. Party, party.

I shifted my arm in the sling and tried to settle back. The morphine and anesthesia would be leaving my body soon, and the ache would build back up in my shoulder. An ache that would burn into pain. "Not to get all drug addict, but can we go to CVS and get my Vicodin?" I asked. "I don't think I'm gonna be very nice if I'm not medicated tonight."

Mary Anne rubbed my thigh. "I'm gonna get you resting, then I'm hitting the town on errands, and stop number one will be the pharmacy. It'll take a while to get it filled, okay, so let's get you settled."

I put my hand on hers, squeezing until she slipped away to shift gears. It took me a while to realize that we weren't headed to my dorm—in fact, we were driving towards her town.

"Where are we going?" I asked, watching her merge onto the freeway.

She grinned at me and explained, "Durham. That bed of yours is way too narrow for you to be spread out comfortably _and_ for me to sleep in it. So, I figured, for the week? We could hole up someplace a bit more hospitable."

"Your dorm? The place where I nearly got brained by one of your asshole Duke pals? No way," I glared.

She just kept grinning until we pulled onto a tree-lined road and headed for a hotel. The hotel where she and Sharon had stayed junior year. "Here? This place is way too expensive, Mary Anne," I said, grabbing the collar of her coat.

"I got a deal. My good friend Jenny, from down the hall in my oh so evil dorm? Her boyfriend's a manager, and he hooked me up with a discount. Besides. Our usual place was full up," she shrugged, pulling into the lot.

"When you said 'hole up'—I'm excused from class this week—are you skipping?" I asked. "I don't want you to skip."

"I emailed them all—I have to go to my Friday rhet theory class for a test, but otherwise, my professors were like, Whatever. I haven't missed once all semester, Logan. I've built up a bit of goodwill. See? Being a brown noser pays off in the end," she beamed.

We checked into room 303 with a lovely view of the dumpsters and a chain link fence. Mary Anne guided me to the bed, helping me out of the clothes and shoes that she had not to long before helped me put on. She studded five kisses in a random pattern on my bare chest, hooking her fingers on the waistband of my workout shorts.

"Alright, I'm off. I'm going to your dorm—anything you want?" she asked,

"You. And my glasses. Shawn forgot them," I glared at the small bag of mine Mary Anne had dropped on the chair. "And my _Sports Night_ DVDs."

She kissed me, drifting her tongue over mine. "Soy-ten-lee. Okay, angel, don't get into too much trouble." She reached over and switched on the television to HBO, putting the remote back on the stand. "Don't miss me too much."

My eyes traced her whole body as she walked over to my bag and fished out my keys and wallet. Her, a delicate frame of bone under such pale skin. So fragile, so frighteningly strong. Her legs, hiding under her jeans. Legs that could run through anything.

Legs that were damn sexy. I could feel a blush rising up my neck as I watched her move to her own purse, I could feel that red feeling travel down my body, I could feel myself, under all of the morphine, start to grow hard. I was glad there was a mountain of blankets on my body—I didn't want her thinking that I was only thinking about one thing.

I couldn't help it: all she had to do was breathe to turn me on.

I glanced at the TV—some movie that Mary Anne adored. Set in London. Lots of people, lots of love. It was actually all around or some nonsense. I rolled my eyes and tried to remember where the remote had gone. Had it walked away? Why couldn't I remember anything? I glanced over to my right—there it was, on the stand.

Next to my immobile right arm. Of course. Mary Anne, you little rat! Now, I was stuck with, oh, God, Emma Thompson? Help, help, help! Maybe a head injury would have been preferable. Then I'd be unconscious and not trapped with one of the Holy Grails of chick flicks. Damn that girl—she did this on purpose. So I took a deep breath and actually began to watch.

It wasn't that bad, but I think the morphine dulled the edges a lot. By the ending, though, I was woozy and flaking into sleep. I closed my eyes.

"Angel?" Mary Anne was saying, rubbing my chest. "Wake up, angel, you gotta take your pills."

I rolled my head to look at her. "Whatimeizzit?"

"Nearly six. You were out like a light, Logan," she grinned. "Here." She offered me her hands. "Let's go on into the bathroom."

"I'm fine, Mary Anne. Besides. If I needed to go, I could manage on my own," I rolled my eyes.

"No, genius, you need to come take your pills, I should adjust your wraps—just come with me," she prodded. I sighed, bending up into a sitting position without using my hands to prop me up. It was a workout drill—get up from laying down without using your hands. The burn of my abdomen for the first few weeks of learning how to whip from flat back to feet. The last time Mary Anne and I had been together before Christmas break our freshman year—it was the middle of the day in my dorm room, and she dropped my shirt to the ground and gawked at my stomach.

"Oh, my," she breathed, running her hands up the ridges. "I hadn't really noticed how—wow."

"You didn't even notice?" I pouted. "Come on, _tesorina_! You know how many hours I spend on my damn back for a six-pack?"

A wicked look spread over her eyes as she shoved me down on the bed. Flat on my back.

Mary Anne was tugging me into the bathroom, but that memory was on my mind, and I felt myself reddening again. She was watching me from head to toe, the line of my shuffling body, my watchman. And this time—this time she saw.

And she bit her lip, that wicked look blooming in her eyes.

She led me past the chest of drawers where she had lined up her own pill box—her depression meds, her vitamins, the hormone supplement she still took. There were moments when I realized, We are waiting for it to return. We are waiting for it to come back and take her away. The cancer. But we were at two and a half years without cancer. The anniversary of her diagnosis was approaching. In the shadow of Valentine's Day. I love you, my pretty girl. Please don't die.

I glanced down at the inside of my forearms—there were still two faint scars on my skin from that night junior year. I bit my lip and tried not to think about it coming back. Don't come back, please.

I took my index finger and traced a heart into her arm. That night, junior year, I knew that I wasn't just in love with her. That was the night I knew: this was my girl. This would be the girl I married.

I just had to get her to live that long.

Mary Anne beamed as she opened the bathroom door. I stepped onto the cold tile and gasped at the amber-rich room, the smell of lavender mixing with the scent of all of the candles, a white-bright floral smell that didn't seem to match the mellowed gold light. On the shut toilet, she had set down sponges, my shaving kit, some strange bottles and jars. And next to that, the large oval tub was filled with steaming water, the surface milky, swirls of white.

"Oh, Mary Anne," I breathed, leaning against her as hard as I dared.

"Well, you said your whole body hurt. A nice hot bath'll help. That, and you smell terrible. Like a mix of hospital and gym. I'm not cuddling with that," she giggled, kissing my left shoulder. She shut the door, closing us in the room and caking us with the dancing gold lights of the flames. Getting down on her knees, she began sliding my shorts off of my hips, pausing to kiss the place where the triangle of bone met under my skin. I thrust out my left hand to hold the wall as her breath hit me, as she pulled the shorts down and exhaled on the stiff line of my cock, her mouth not touching but coming so close. Close enough to make my eyes curl shut and my lips tighten. I want, I _want_.

I knew guys who would make their girls say things—_Tell me how good I am, tell me how good I feel in you. Tell me how big I am, how you love my big dick, tell me_. Never. Not even when I was cooking with lust, never. I loved her own words, I loved how Mary Anne loved words—the way she could describe things to make me feel like I had never seen them before. I would never take away those words from her. Each time she spoke, it was like a surprise. A present, a _tesorina_. But sometimes, she would bite my lip and run her nails in the hard plank of my back and say something like that. _Oh, God, Logan, you're so good. I love you, I love the way you fill me, God, I love you, you're so good, oh, oh,_ her fingers would rip harder into me, _you're so perfect, harder—harder, Logan, harder, please. _

And I would. But I loved it best when we just kissed and laughed and talked and looked at each other. Though I loved it when she says my name when she comes. As if I am inside of her skin. I want to be as close to you as I can, Mary Anne, take me down with you.

Take me in you.

She helped me into the tub, the hot water biting my skin. She had rolled towels and laid them under my arm, buffering it on the ledge, snuggling it into place against the tiled wall. I wrenched my eyes closed as a wave of pain trained from my shoulder to the tips of my fingers, and when I opened my eyes, she was in the water with me, holding a glass of juice and two pills in front of my face.

I swallowed, finishing the juice and staring at the glass. "Wally Juice?"

"I even emailed Ry, said that you were injured and that you'd need extra hocus pocus. I can't believe you still buy into that," she sniffed, putting the glass on the toilet's tank.

I shrugged on my left side. "You ride the horse that brung ya, _tesorina_."

She laughed, slipping her hands under the surface and touching my legs. "Right? Well. Let's get you smelling fresh and clean. For my sake." I laughed back at her as she grabbed a washcloth, lathered in my body wash, and dipped it in the water, moving in firm circles all over my legs. "Can't believe you didn't get a shower last night. What kind of hospital is that."

"A fine, fine center of medical care," I grinned. "You might be familiar with it, Miss Spier? They also have some great cancer care?"

"Whatever. Dr. Wilks says that UNC is voodoo medicine," she sniffed, moving the cloth up my thighs. She looked at me from the bottom of her eyes. "Be warned. I'm cleaning the bathing suit area now."

I tried to laugh, but my exhalation snagged hard in my throat as she touched me. Too long. Sneak. Relaxing as she moved up to my stomach, I asked, "So, who won the election yesterday?"

"My guy," she declared. "See? Your dirty third party tricks didn't stop us. House and Senate stayed the same. Oh. And Issue Three failed."

"Good," I nodded. "I'm so freaking tired of the government butting in on issues like that."

"Libertarian," Mary Anne muttered, rolling the cloth up my chest. "I voted based on democratic principles, you know, my civil rights and all? But no no, not my boyfriend. He votes from a crazy place." I blew her a raspberry as she grabbed the sponge and cleaned my upper body of the foaming soap. "I am going to shave you, too."

I unfolded my left hand in front of her face as she nudged into my lap. "Hello? Still have my good hand working just fine?"

"Hello, you're high? I'm not letting you move a sharp blade over your jugular," she retorted, wetting my face with a dab of the sponge.

"Yeah, cause you didn't shred me the last time you tried," I laughed, eyeing her with a prickling nervousness as she picked up my shaving gel.

She clicked her tongue, lathering my face and neck. "I will do much better this time. And—and, I mean, I've learned to tie a tie since then. My man skills have definitely improved." Winking, she grabbed the razor and sliced it in the air a few times. "Who trusts their love?"

"I suppose I do," I sighed, squeezing my eyes shut. But I looked at her as she leaned in close, biting down on her tongue as she passed the blade over the lines of my face. I heard the splash of the blade in the water after each stroke, her fingers moving over each clean strip of my skin. With her thumb, she held my lower lip down, mushing my smile so she could flick the razor below my nose. Her hand guided my face up, down, side to side, strange upward angles as she moved with a deliberation, a determination. Bearing down. When she got to my neck, she glided over my Adam's apple, up the floor of my chin. So gentle. Like kisses, her fingers were.

She set the razor down, and I saw her move her face into a smirk—but it evaporated. Mary Anne set her thumb on my lips, tracing them. I caught the tip of her thumb with my teeth and sucked it in, rolling my tongue around and biting on the base of the nail before letting her go again. She tipped her head and reached into the water, grabbing my left hand and putting its ring finger in her mouth.

I tried not to moan as she slid it back out, so slow, so sweet. She leaned forward, her breath sugar on my face. "I'm going to marry you," she smiled. Oh, that smile. Oh, how bright the room was in the wake of that smile.

"What, like, today?" I said, raising my eyebrows. Marriage. Family. I slumped back against the wall, and I watched her face dim into a frown.

"Angel? What's wrong," she said, holding hard to my hand.

I licked my lips. "Tell me a secret, pretty girl."

Mary Anne paused. "Um. Okay. Uh—I totally ate the last of Erin's cookies, but I blamed it on Jeremy and Aaron 'cause they were really drunk and don't remember, and she's actually really pissed about it. I couldn't help it—they were the most delicious cookies I've ever had. I'm gonna have to order a box of my own." Her hands touched my face. "Tell me your secret, Logan."

I swallowed. "Yesterday—after the MRI and stuff, as I was, like, waiting for you to come? Coach D called my dad. Told him what happened, and they put me on the phone to him? And…" I swallowed again, once, twice—why wouldn't the stone in my throat disappear? "And Dad yelled at me—so loud that Coach actually winced, you know? Said I was a screw up, that I let down my team and myself. That I should know that I suck in the paint and stuff, that I brought it on myself. He reminded me, so kindly, that had I played for U of Lou, I wouldn't have sat on the bench my freshman year like a loser, and, therefore, I wouldn't be staring at two wasted years."

"You sat behind the number one point guard in America," Mary Anne spat. "You learned so much by being his back up. Your dad is ignorant."

I shifted against the wall. "I just—I know he's being _him_, you know? And it doesn't necessarily hurt anymore. I mean, I just won't talk to him for a while, right, maybe I'll just spend Christmas here or something. But it's just—here I am, in massive pain and drugged out and pretty fucking scared, and my dad chooses to stick it to me. Like I can't make myself feel like shit without his help, right? Like I need him to do it?"

She was just watching me, waiting. So I breathed. "Don't let me ever be like him, pretty girl. Please. Don't let me hurt you or our kids, please, I don't want to do that to the people I love. Make everything about _me_ and my idea of the world. Honestly? I wouldn't care if my son never played sports. If he wanted to be an artist or an actor or something the opposite of what my dad would say is 'manly.' Hell, I wouldn't care if he were gay. I would just want him to work hard, always do his best, and be happy. I would want him to be happy," I said, folding my head down on my fist.

Mary Anne put her arms around my chest, urging my head on her shoulder. "I am so blessed that you'll be the dad to my sons," she whispered, kissing my cheek. "They'll be the luckiest boys in the world."

"You think?" I murmured, holding her tighter.

"I know," she replied, easing up her hips, her fingers reaching between my legs and holding me so she could slide down, pushing me inside of her. I groaned, burying my face against the base of her neck. She wanted to be as close to me as I did to her. She wanted to tell me something.

That she wanted me. That she wanted me to be the father of her children—that she _trusted_ me to be a better father than Richard Spier or Lyman Bruno. This is how she told me, the way that you would make a baby.

If Mary Anne could have children. Sons with her eyes and her gorgeous smile. If only. If only.

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I could feel myself falling asleep there, my head on her chest. I had her right hand in with mine, her left hand resting on my scalp. I was waiting for her to wake up. My back had stiffened into concrete, but I didn't want to move. Here, I could listen to the sound of her heart, that strong beat that said she would come back.

And so I would wait. As long as it took for her to wake up.

Glancing at my watch, I tried to figure out how long Dawn, Stacey, and Erin had been gone. Gone to clean the bedroom, to pick up dinner. An hour or two, maybe? I wasn't sure. I had called Emily, and that felt like an eternity, trying to talk her into calm.

"No, I'm serious, Logan, I'm coming—I'll get a flight for tomorrow or Sunday. Maybe I can catch a red eye out tonight," she stated, a faint clicking of computer keys floating over the phone.

"Em, don't," I sighed. "You'll be here in a week, she's fine. Honestly. We told Sharon not to come, this really isn't that big of a deal."

She snorted. "You say this because you are there, and you can see her. I need to see May, I need to touch her and see her and know that she's okay. Jesus, Lee, I have been having these nightmares ever since the cancer came back? About her and Barbara, like, doing shit together? And Ran and I try to join them, and they just ignore us. And then they just…May looks like she did back when she was in the coma, all bald and so fucking thin that you could see her organs, right, and Barbara—she looks like she—in her uniform and all covered in blood and burns and—okay? Do you understand? I'm having nightmares that my best friend is gonna die, so don't you tell me that it's not a big deal."

I pressed my mouth shut. Emily was my ally—now that Barbara was gone, Emily was the one who I had to keep on my side. Miranda was a lost cause. "Well. How about you come as early as Monday. My sister's in the house right now? And it's just so freakin' crowded. I think Jeff's great, but I need him to leave, too. Him and his issues," I added, rubbing my forehead. "There just isn't enough room for me and Mary Anne and the babies and the cancer _and_ Dawn and Stacey's drama _and_ Jeff's problems, you know?"

"Randa's ready to get a dumpster and toss them all in," Emily grumbled. "She thinks you and May are retarded for letting them all stay."

"Sometimes, I think we are, too," I said with a cough of a laugh. "But Mary Anne likes having people around. Her sister. And she's just damned determined to make Jeff like her…Emmy, it's just a mess. I really get so lost sometimes? I've just been living at work and at the gym and hiding at my friends' places. I've gotten pretty good at Playstation shit thanks to all of this."

"You. Weren't you the one who gave us the huge ass lecture on how video games were a waste of time that you could spend doing _real_ activities?" she laughed. "I officially challenge you to a Madden Football face down."

"It's on," I grinned. "I am really excited to see you. You and Randa. I mean, Mary Anne has incredible friends here—her dorm girls are a friggin' scream—but they don't mean the same as the two of you."

"I feel the same way with my friends at school, too," she said. "That, and when I get on a rant? They usual act scared. That's when May and Babs would fold their hands in their laps and listen patiently, and Randa would egg me on. It's not the same."

"Speaking of Ran?" I said, clearing my throat. "I don't suppose you could call her."

"What, not in the mood to get blamed for all of this?" she laughed. "Sure. And I'll call you as to when I'm flying in. Monday at the earliest—you sure? Please, please, Lee?"

"Calling me Lee gets you nowhere, Emily Adelaide," I shot back. "Call me later."

"Tell her that I love her," Emily added, her voice lower than the static of the line.

"And she loves you," I said back, squeezing Mary Anne's hand. She loves, oh, how she loves.

She loves me. How lucky am I? She loves these babies—how lucky will we be?

I tilted my head forward, trying to stretch my neck. I turned it back and saw it.

The spread of red on the white blanket. Coming from between her legs.

I sprung up and slammed my hand on the nurse call button, shouting, "I need someone? Please! Help me!" I wrenched the blankets back from her body and saw the pond of her blood on the bed, dripping through her underwear.

A hand shoved me back. "Move," a voice commanded, two nurses moving to either side of her body. One of them hit the button on the wall again, and they began shouting orders to each other. The male nurse put a finger on the crotch of Mary Anne's panties, moving them aside, and a red gush ran over his fingers.

I stumbled back, knocking against one of the empty beds. My knees watered under me, and I crouched down on my ankles, cradling my head in my hands. I did this. _I did this_. The blood thinners, that risk, my choice. Look what I did—my wife, bleeding. My wife, in pain.

"Make it stop," I begged, staring up at the nurses, at the other personnel running to her bed. "Make it stop, please."

"We need to you step away," a nurse said, glancing at me. I gagged at the sight of her blood-soaked underwear, wadded up at the end of her bed as the nurses raised her legs up, and ran into the bathroom.

I bent town over the toilet and spit up nothing. My empty stomach had nothing to let go. I kept spitting, though, the bitter acid from my stomach. It burned up my throat. Pain. Make me hurt, just like her. Don't let her be alone.

The longer I stayed there, the more I convinced myself that they could save the babies. They could, moving so fast to help her, they could do anything. Doctors saved her over and over again. A baby? They could bring Mary Anne back from death, they could save her babies. Please, please.

She'll never forgive me. She'll never want to love me again. She'll never want to look me in the eye again because she'll see the babies I made her lose peering back.

The door opened, and a nurse with blood on her arms came in, a plastic biohazard bucket in her hands. A small container. As wide as my hands set together. A cradle.

Its opaque walls were smeared with blood, and I could see something in the bottom.

She jerked back, staring at me the way you do with a dog you're about to put down. Sympathy, sorrow. And the beg of forgiveness. She tightened her hands around the container and her eyes pleaded with me. To not hate her for walking into this room with that.

"One or both?" I managed.

"One," she said. She shifted her lips and bit at the corner. "For now."

I nodded, forcing myself to stand. I hit the flush on the toilet. "I'll let you—I mean, you need to use the room."

She looked down again as I walked out, walking back to Mary Anne. Still asleep as the doctors and nurses hovered around her. She was in a fresh gown, a fresh bed, but her legs were still coated in blood. A nurse was washing that away, though; I could see a paper pair of bulky underpants covering her now. I came up to her side and sat in the chair, not looking at them. But they were looking at me.

"Is she okay?" I asked, touching her face.

"We're giving her a transfusion," someone said. Who? Did it matter anymore? "That may perk her right up, wake her up, too. The bleeding slowed about five minutes ago—it shouldn't be any heavier than a period now. When you take her home, you'll have to watch to see if she miscarries the other fetus. We can't be sure."

I nodded again, a bobblehead of a man. "Do you all have to be here now?"

"No," that someone said again. "Take a few minutes, then we'll come back to check on her. I'm very sorry."

I shrugged, waiting for him to leave. For all of them to leave. The nurse with the sponge placed it in a basin and walked away. I wondered where the woman with the container went. Where do you put things like that?

The urge to be sick screamed up my throat again, and I forced myself to focus on Mary Anne. I climbed up onto the bed and lifted her small body up, laying her down on my body. Brushing her hair back, I whispered into her ear. Her name. Over and over again, rivering it into her ear. _Mary Anne, Mary Anne, Mary Anne_. Come back to me. _Pretty girl, pretty girl, my Mary Anne, Mary Anne, I love you, Mary Anne, Mary Anne_.

My voice began bottoming out, lowing down into a hoarse blanket over her skin. I cried on her shoulder, but I kept saying her name. I felt my heart breaking, but I kept saying her name.

"Angel," she whispered. I wiped my eyes on my shirt and looked at her, at the penny-bright eyes that always pierced right inside of me. She knew what I looked like under my skin, seeing me. _Me_. Did she see that this was my fault? Did she see that I was bad?

"Hey, pretty girl," I murmured, kissing each of her cheeks. She puckered her lips, and I kissed her there, too, over and over again. "How do you feel?"

She closed her eyes and opened them again. "Tired."

"Yeah, it's been a long day," I said, kissing her cheeks again. "But I'm here."

Grabbing my shirt, she nodded. "Me, too. I'm sorry, husband. I'm so sorry."

"What are you sorry for?" I asked, cupping her face in my hands.

Her eyes grew wet, and she put a hand on her belly. "Because it was a boy, Logan. It was a boy."


	16. Chapter 14: Mary Anne

Dawn yanked the blanket back, the flag back, and squatted next to the bed. "Come on, May, get up," she ordered, yanking my hand off of my teddy bear.

I pulled the flag back over my body and held tighter to J.B. I curled my head over his and stared at the wall, at the vanilla heart of that blank wall. It was easy to look at it. I could do that, I could watch the wall. That wall held a secret, I knew it, if I just kept looking long enough, I would know the truth. I would get to know why this was happening to me.

If I meant that I was a bad person. My hands felt covered in tar, my heart was a leadened thing. Everything was slowly stripped away. My breasts. My baby. Soon, the other baby, I knew it. Soon, me.

So I stared at the wall. It was all I could do.

Dawn looked over me. "I'm gonna yank her out of bed."

"Don't," Jeff snapped, sitting down next to me. "Read the notecard. It says, 'Mary Anne has to make the decision to leave a depressive episode. Encouragement, directive comments. No enabling, don't do it for her.'"

"That's total therapy talk," Dawn sniffed. "I hate psychobabble. She's going to be late for chemo, okay, we don't have time to screw around here." She leaned over and took my face in her hands. "We don't have time to screw around, May. We have to get going."

Jeff tapped my shoulder. I was so heavy, my bones iron and sinking down, that I couldn't make my way to look at him. He climbed over my body and crouched down next to Dawn. "Hey, sis," he said, reaching out and rubbing my curls. "Good morning. How are you feeling today?"

The motion of his fingers on my scalp made me sigh. The warm circles in my skin felt so good, I took in a deep breath and sunk against his touch. Dragging my eyes from the wall to him, I tried to shrug, but it was too much. "I'm tired, Jeff."

"I know, sis, I know," he whispered, kissing my forehead. "It's been a shitty string of days. But today is a big day, and you need to get up, okay?"

I blinked at him, and he frowned. "Mar—May, do you know what day it is?"

"I don't know," I admitted, and he began to swim behind the tears that had crawled into my eyes.

Jeff kept rubbing my scalp. "It's okay, sis. That's why we're here, right, Dawnie?"

"We're your calendar," Dawn announced, putting her hand on mine, pressing my fingers deeper into J.B. "It's Wednesday. Today, you've got chemo—exciting, I know—and therapy, you planned on going to service with Logan at noon, and then Emily and Randa are here. We bought a shitload of beer, so it'll be good times."

"Good times," I murmured, digging deeper under the flag. Jeff's face loomed in front of me like a browned moon, the dark crags of his eyes boring into me.

He took my face in his hands. "May, let's get out of bed. You can do it. Dawnie and me'll make sure you don't fall." I didn't move, and Jeff bit his lip. "Sis. Please. I'm asking you to get out of bed."

My brother was asking me. My brother. _Brother_.

My baby had a brother. That brother was gone. I felt my lip shake, and I started sobbing into my bear's head, the fur between the ears matting down from all of the water I raced into its surface. Dawn wrapped her arms around my hips, but Jeff snaked his body around mine, the warm line of him surrounding all that was cold in me. I had gotten chemo this week—twice? I think, twice?—and that fire-feel of it lanced my blood, but it left. It was gone, so quick. And I was cold so much of the time. Nothing could make me a fire girl again. That was over.

What else was over? Why did this have to happen to me?

"It's okay to cry," Dawn was saying, her hands lower than her brother's on my back. "Just get it all out."

It would never leave. That was the problem.

I took in a ragged inhale, and Jeff pulled back slightly to look me in the eyes. "You ready to get up?"

No. But how could I tell my brother no? I nodded, and Jeff and Dawn scrambled to get in front of me. They were so similar, their startling shocks of platinum hair, the way their skin glowed so tan. Their faces were even the same, long with narrow eyes and thin lips. Miranda always said Dawn was a "butter face," but the shortness of her hair softened the sharp features so well. So lovely, my sister. So handsome, my brother. Why were they so close, why didn't they ever let me in?

But they were, offering me their hands to help me up. I let go of the bear, and Jeff moved it behind me on the bed. My brother and sister helped me lurch to my feet, yawning as I stretched up, my fingers popping towards the ceiling.

Dawn walked over to the closet. "Do you want me to McGIll you?"

I didn't answer, instead making my way to the dresser to pull out some underwear. Jeff put his hand on my shoulder. "I'll go wait in the hallway," he offered, stepping out of the room and closing the door.

"How about this?" Dawn suggested, pulling out a navy skirt and top.

"No," I mumbled. I grabbed a pair of panties and some new black nylons and walked to the hamper. I fished out what I wanted—a black dress with a slight bell skirt. When I pulled it on, my belly made a slight bulge in the line of the fabric; I tugged the skirt tight, trying to get the waistband into perfect place. Each day I wore it, it grew tighter. I found a black cardigan in the hamper and slid that on, too.

Pressing her lips together, Dawn said, "Did you want to shower?"

"No," I replied, changing into my clean underwear. I grabbed the bottle of Frebreeze and squirted the dress with it. I added on some of my perfume on my neck and wrists. I knew this would cover the musty, days-old scent of the outfit. Not that I cared. I wanted everyone to know: I hurt. I ache. I am mourning.

My catheter tumbled over the boatneck cut of the dress, and I shoved it back into place. Dawn came up beside me and asked, "Breakfast?"

"I'm not hungry," I told her, rubbing my face. So many questions! Did they never stop?

"You have to eat," Dawn declared. "You have to. You can't starve yourself like last time, you—"

"I didn't starve myself, Jesus," I snapped, whipping my hands down. "I didn't want to _eat_, okay? Eating meant puking, and I hated it, I _hated_ it. You don't know what it's like to look at food and see it not how it looks right in front of you but instead what it looks like after it's been inside of your body. You put anything in front of me, I can tell you what it looks like vomited up, understand? And that's why I didn't eat, Dawn Schafer."

"Oh, May," Dawn sighed, reaching out to touch my arm.

"No," I shouted. "Leave me alone." I forced my body to move out of the room, to the hallway and past Jeff, down the stairs where I slumped onto the lowest step and curled my legs up to my chest. "Why won't everyone just leave me alone?"

Jeff sat down next to me. "Because we like you."

"You hate me," I shot back. "You said so yourself."

"I don't hate you," he sighed, putting his hand on my knee. "I said, it's hard to live with you. It's hard to be your brother. To be the Jessica Simpson to your Ashlee."

"Ashlee's the one who wrote the song," I protested, wiping my eyes with the sleeve of my cardigan.

Dawn snorted, coming up behind me and rubbing my back. "Yeah, but Jessica went off the freakin' rails during our senior year. Ever since the John Mayer thing, it's been All Ashlee, man."

Clenching his hands together, Jeff looked at me. "To be real? It was when Kerry and I were watching you sleep in the hospital on Saturday morning that I kinda went, Fuck my issues with Mary Anne. This is my sister, you know, and she's totally hurting. That, and—I don't know, Kerry kept calling you her 'sister' over and over. And she's got issues about being in Logan's shadow, but that doesn't stop them from loving each other, and well…yeah. Everything just clicked in," Jeff explained.

"Are you and Kerry technically related now?" Dawn mused. "You can't mack on your own sister, Jeffie."

"One, no we are _not_ related. And two, the Brunos are from Kentucky. Y'all," he added, snickering.

"You _kin_ do it," Dawn teased, scuffing the back of his head with her hand. "Come on, May, Stace made crepes before she left for class. They're delicious, totally."

"I've never had crepes," I said, taking Jeff's hand to pull myself up.

Jeff gave me a thumbs up, tugging me into the kitchen. "We'll just wrap 'em up, we're totally going to be late." Dawn skittered to the oven, pulling out a foil wrapped bundle; as she unwrapped it, a sweet rush of sugared pancake smell hit my face. She grabbed a Tupperware container.

"You want another one, Jeff?" she asked, cramming a crepe full of strawberries, blueberries, and whipped heavy cream. She rolled it up and put it in the container as he nodded. "May, do you want a fruit crepe or one with Nutella? Are you the one who eats that stuff?"

"Fruit for me, please—Logan loves that Nutella crap on toast. It combines his two favorite things—carbs and chocolate." I grinned, grabbing a blueberry and popping it into my mouth. The deep violet taste slid down my tongue and into my throat. "He's ridiculous—he eats like a Clydesdale, but he can never keep weight on."

Jeff laughed, covering his mouth, full and messy with strawberries. "Dude, this morning? While you were upstairs? He was whining about he has to gain ten pounds this summer, and Stacey nearly beat his brains in with the frying pan. I don't get it—Stace is a babe."

"Most girls are paranoid about their bodies," Dawn sighed. "Not me. I know I'm lucky, but I work out for this," she said, running her hands down her sides.

"Well, you still eat like a rabbit, chicken or no," I told her, tossing a strawberry at her head.

She waved a crepe at me. "Tofu is really yummy, just for the record."

I glanced at the two of them. "Not so much, thank you." I glanced at the clock. "We better go—breakfast in the car, how classy."

The cream slid over my fingers as I ate the crepes, but I _ate_, devouring each pancake in minutes, the fruit coating my stomach with a warm fullness. I crossed my sticky fingers, praying that they would stay down. I threw up after my first chemo session on Monday, but yesterday, it had all stayed down. That was good. But the tiredness had hit me like an angry hand, whirling me back into sleep in the late afternoon and keeping me there until the sun was sinking down in the summer sky. Monday night, I managed to go downstairs and sit with my family and Stacey.

But not last night. I woke up at eight and stared at the ceiling until midnight, until Logan crept into bed next to me, tucking me into the deep fold of his arms. When the alarm clock went off this morning before six, I opened my eyes and realized: I could not move. I was so tired, so unvarnished by everything—the depression, the miscarriage, the cancer—that I could not move.

And I didn't want to.

But I pretended to sleep when Logan kissed me goodbye. I didn't want him to know. Because he would put his bag down and stay with me instead of doing what he needed to. What he wanted to. _I want to be with you_, he would protest. But he needs to have a life that isn't babysitting his wife. I hated smothering, I hated hovering, and I knew that if I opened the door, he would walk right through, gluing himself to my side.

After three years of Together But Independent, it could be ruined. For three years, we had learned that we could do what we wanted, even if it took us away from the other because we trusted, we _knew_ that we would come back to each other, whether that meant we weren't able to see each other for days. Or, like once freshman year, three weeks. He was twisting himself around that basketball, spending every free moment on homework, and I was caught up with my service fraternity, with a research project in my English class, with tenting for the Duke games, with so many little things that stuttered all over my free time. We would call each other late at night and talk, but when he or I would float the idea of me driving over to see him, the other would sigh and say, _I'm so tired, love. _I would say, _Too tired to drive_. He would say, _Too tired to get out of bed_.

When we finally were able to make time, the moment I met him at his dorm door, he wrapped his arms around me and said, _Thank you for understanding._

I hugged him tight around his waist and thought, Once upon a time, Logan would have been annoyed when I said _too tired to drive_. Annoyed when he said, _Come over—I'm actually done with homework, _or_, I'll even come to Durham. Let's get dinner at Brightlieaf_, and I told him, No. Too busy. So overworked, not now, angel. Once upon a time, Logan would have whined and pressed and battered on me to get his way.

This Logan, he knew—timing is everything. We had all the time in the world to be together. A few days, a few weeks, what were they in the face of years and years?

So I hugged him tight, watching him wince as my touch hit the bruises on his torso. I lifted his shirt there, in front of a group of students walking out of the dorm, because I had to see what he had described: a bruise in the shape of the toe of a shoe, connecting with his flesh.

I stepped back and dropped the shirt. "Do you have a bruised rib?"

He shrugged, putting his arm around my shoulder and guiding me into the hall. "We play y'all on Tuesday—if I did, do you think I'd tell anyone?"

To this day, I don't know how badly he was hurt. But he played with so much fury and so much power that night, I couldn't tell. That night, though, I held an ice pack to his chest for hours as he bit at his lip and didn't speak.

Logan moved through pain without a word. Just like he was doing now, tucking away what happened on Friday and moving forward. While I was stuck here in the lows of my depression. How did he do it?"

I glanced up at Jeff. "Can you hand me my purse?"

"Do you want the hand sanitizer, too?" he asked, giving both to me. I quick cleaned my hands before digging past my bear and Barbara's flag to find my dayplanner. I scanned today, Wednesday, and frowned. When was his next pick up game? Tomorrow. Six.

"Hey, Jeff, are you planning on going to the game tomorrow?" I asked, tapping his shoulder.

"Yeah—I'm gonna play," he beamed. "One of the forwards is going home for a wedding, and they think I won't get too blasted, so I'm in. Fucking cool, huh?"

"Very," I smiled. "I'm going to come with you."

Dawn hit the brakes too hard, and I smacked my chest against Jeff's seat. "You. Go to a game. One, you hate basketball. Two, you hate watching your guy play. And three—you really think Em and Randa will want to go with you?"

"One, I do not _hate_ basketball. I just find it to be boring unless it's Duke. Two, I do, but I want to…I just want to figure out how he's dealing with all of this. Like, how come I can't get out of bed, but he's so calm about it all," I explained.

"He's not calm. He's completely closed off," Dawn said, her hands tight on the wheel. "We've been trying to talk to him, right? But he just goes into the study and shuts the door, says he has 'work.' Which is total bullshit because, hi, he doesn't have any summer classes, not like Stacey."

"That how he deals—his parents used to hide their problems from their kids. They'd never fight in front of him or Kerry and Hunter. They'd have arguments in the middle of the night—Loud Talks. Logan hates shouting matches because of that, hates, like, confrontation. Once? Shawn and his freshman year girlfriend were screaming at each other, and Logan was so freaked that he came over to my dorm, he just had to get away. And that's the night when one of the guys on my floor chucked a beer bottle at his head. Anyway, it's just how he is," I shrugged.

Jeff looked at his sister. "Kinda like Stacey, huh. Stace hates talking about her problems. She'll just shut the problems out."

"Remember in eighth grade? When she was having those insulin problems? She just ignored them," I realized. "Ninth grade, too. And when she and Sam broke up, it was like she just erased him, it was insane. And Claudia—like she didn't even exist." I took a deep breath as Dawn pulled us into the hospital parking garage. "How come she's letting you back in?"

"Not entirely," Dawn mumbled, pressing the button for a parking ticket. "She's still down in the freakin' basement. But she's talking to me."

"And?" Jeff prompted.

Dawn was silent for a long time, winding us up the levels of the garage. As we got into the elevator to the trams, she leaned against her brother and answered, "And I broke things off with Henry. That made Stacey happy."

"What! Dawn!" I exclaimed. "I really liked him, and he really liked you—why did you do that?"

"Because I was wrong," she stated, looking ahead at the steel fronts of the elevators. "I was wrong, and I had to stop."

Jeff ducked his head, looking down at the floor as he reached up and tugged on her hair. "It's okay, Dawnie." She gave him a miserable look, and they both glanced at their feet.

"I do _not_ get it," I snapped, putting my hands on my hips. "What is so bad here? Stacey is totally overreacting, don't give in to her. I mean, what, she has a crush on him?"

"She is not overreacting," Dawn said, her voice low. "Just…you don't date professors. It's not right."

I bent my head down, trying to grab Jeff's eyes. "Will someone just tell me what the big secret is?"

"It's Stacey's business. Mine and hers," Dawn said, a bite on her words. "You want to share secrets? Okay, share this since Jeff asked him and he got all weird—why did Logan pick basketball, huh? He ditched football and baseball and became Mr. All World. Why. What happened with him the summer before high school, May?"

I reddened, and my hands grew tight, like they were caught in a door. "That's private."

"Why he plays a stupid sport? Private?" Dawn spat. "How about this—I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Until you come clean about that, you don't get to know about Stacey. Deal?"

I scratched my neck and stared at the elevator doors. I felt trapped, tied in, I had to get out. It wasn't my secret to tell. It wasn't a secret to tell at all. _It's nobody's business but mine. And yours now_, he told me years ago. It weighed in my belly like a stone, pushing so far down in me that I felt my balance shift, my body rocked forward. Jeff grabbed my arm, his eyes full of concern, but I shot him a smile, as bright as my mouth allowed, and dashed off the elevator the moment we reached my floor.

We waited in silence for almost twenty minutes before I was called into the chemo room; Dawn and Jeff pulled chairs up to the leather recliner where I settled. By the time the nurse came around with the IV, I had draped the flag over my body, tucking the bear in my lap.

"You look like you're going to a funeral, not just chemo," the nurse said, inserting the needle of the IV into my catheter.

I swallowed hard, staring up at the drip of the drugs. "I am," I murmured. The drops came down like rain. Like tears.

She put her hand on my shoulder, pressing down lightly, before walking away. I sighed, staring up at the clock on the wall—thirty minutes. I settled back against the cool line of the chair and stared up at the television, some annoying talk show blaring on the screen.

Jeff fiddled his hands together. "What do we do?"

Dawn grabbed a plastic basin. "When May tosses her cookies, we hold this for her, and then we give her tissue to wipe up. Until then, we just watch." She leaned forward, bugging her eyes at me. I giggled, swatting at her with J.B. Her mouth tipped up at the corners, and she poked her brother. "We could also talk. About you, Cassanova, getting the Virgin Kerry to kiss you."

"What!" I exclaimed, squeezing the bear. "When!"

He grinned, crossing his legs and stuffing his hands behind his head. "Saturday, when we had the morning shift, watching over you? She was crying, like, about the baby. Not because it…well, she said that was God's will. She was more upset because she and Logan went for a little walk before he left, and—she didn't tell me what they said, but they both came back with really red eyes. And then Kerry burst into tears when he left."

"So you hooked up with a crying girl?" I gasped. "Kerry rarely cries—you totally took advantage of her!"

"No, no," Jeff rushed, waving his hands between us. "I totally cheered her up. Told her stories about me and Dawn banging around Cali—told her about the time that we freaked you out with the ghost in the secret passage," he smirked, high-fiving his sister.

I glared at them. "I still hate you for that." I paused, picking at my nails for a moment before looking up at Dawn. "You know, you used to be Miss Mystery. I mean, Sharon and you used to exchange her Sue Graftons and stuff, you used to love ghost stories. Why aren't you into them anymore?"

Dawn shrugged, the muscles around her eyes twitching. "Ghosts are fun in theory. I guess—the shit with your mom back before ninth grade. Really freaked me out. It wasn't as much fun to play pretend with what goes bang in the night when it's driving my sister insane, you know?"

Jeff coughed. "Um. Speaking of sisters—I kissed Kerry, hello?"

I shook my body, trying to get the memory of that time in my life off of me. I was going crazy again, wasn't I. Mom: I had seen her just the other day, I had. A chill skidded up my veins, and I forced myself to prod Jeff to continue.

He grinned, leaning forward on his knees. "So, yeah, I got her laughing and whatever, and then I gave her a hug, and some of her hair fell out of the bun she had put her hair up in? And I brushed it right out of her eyes," he said, reaching over to his sister and mussing her hair, making a strand fall into her face. He pushed it back behind her ear and then smirked at me. "That's when she got all dreamy looking, and I gave her a kiss."

"And then?" Dawn prompted.

Jeff scowled. "She shoved me back, said that was all I got. She's a cold fish. A sexy fish, but a cold one. I'm trying to decide if I should try again with her or not before she leaves on Saturday."

"Let it go, Jeff," I sighed, scratching my chest. It was getting warm under my skin, a bubbling feel like boiling water. "Kerry's got a big change ahead of her, moving and all. You kissed her, you can consider her conquered."

He squinted at me, a sad softness creeping over his lips. "You think you'll ever cheat on Logan?"

"What!" I squealed, catching my fingers in the hem of my dress. "How dare you say that!"

"I'm not being a dick. I'm just asking: how do you know that you won't cheat? I mean, what is it, fifty percent of all people cheat?" he asked. "Can you ever be sure? What if you get all better, right, and you suddenly realize that, at nineteen, your entire fucking life has been plugged into place. Wouldn't you be tempted, just once?" he prodded, holding his fingers open an inch. "I mean, you're cute, May. You could pull ass, totally."

"I'm only cute?" I replied. Jeff snorted, and I scowled at him. "I have been hit on plenty of times since I've come to college, thank you, and I haven't been tempted to cheat." My frown deepened and I added, "So how come you think that I would cheat and not Logan?"

"Because Dawn says that he's a serial monogamist," Jeff laughed. "I told him that, and he said that was probably right. And that Dawn hates him."

"Probably right with that, too," Dawn giggled. "Oh, _relax_, May, Jesus, I'm kidding," she snapped, slapping my knee. "Though, I don't know—if Randa wasn't such a good friend of yours, I wouldn't put it past her to make a play for him. The way she talks, she still doesn't understand why he never slept with her. I think she'd love the chance to nail him and put him in the Randa Kills column."

My mouth dropped. "She would not, Dawnie."

"She would so," Dawn insisted. "_If_ he wasn't yours. Get it? She loves you, she'd never hurt you. But Randa thinks she's God's gift to mankind, that no man would ever tell her no."

"Gee, who does she think she is, you?" Jeff snickered, bumping into his sister. "See, May? You're cute. Pretty, maybe. But Dawn's the hottie."

I sulked, huddling around J.B. "I want to be the hottie. I'm calling Logan. He'll tell me that I'm the hot sister."

"Girls, you're both hot," the nurse laughed, coming over to take my blood pressure. I held my breath as the numbers came out 134/90. I turned my face, letting my cheek mash against the cold leather. Still too high, still too much of a risk.

When the nausea rolled over my body a few minutes later, I welcomed it. Anything to get my mind off of this, off of the truth—my body wasn't right for a baby. Not even one baby. I held my belly, not because I was feeling sick, but to hold that little fish of a thing hard inside of me. Stay here, please, I begged, stroking my thumbs over the fabric of my black dress. Don't go where I can't follow.

Sitting there under Barbara's flag, in the black dress I wore to her funeral, in the dress I wore every night for a month, I prayed to her and wherever she went with my son: _Not this one, too_.

Dawn sat on the armrest and pulled me against her body. "What are you thinking about?"

"My baby," I whispered. I just didn't say which one.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I crept up behind him as he talked on the phone, my aching body slumped in a curl as I shuffled to the backs of his shoulders. I put my arms around his neck, and he turned his head and kissed my cheek.

"Hey, Mary Anne's here," Logan said into the phone. He paused and smiled at me. "Davis says hey, that he's praying for you."

"Hi, Dave, and tell him I'm praying for _him_. To not be eaten by a rhino or something," I said, coming around to the front of the bench to sit down.

Grinning, Logan repeated what I said, and then he laughed. "There are no rhinos in the Sudan," he informed me, patting my leg and mouthing, _Just a couple more minutes_.

I nodded, stretching my arms back. I used him as a wall, leaning my back against his right arm, as I stared over at the church. It wasn't an imposing cathedral, large stone faces with the blind eyes of stained glass staring down at the people on the sidewalk, but it had the imposing coldness that I associated with Catholic churches. As if it knew something I didn't. How to be saved. How to be good.

It feared me into staying on the outside.

At least once a month, Logan came to church here; we would meet for brunch, and he would sit at our table with a look of calm on his face, like he had been absolved. I wondered if he had been trapped in a vicious cycle—his faith brought him immense guilt, but it brought him relief from that guilt, and then the guilt would build back up, requiring him to return to the church for that relief.

"I am not guilty and stuff because I'm Catholic," he snapped at me during senior year. "I just—I'm not perfect."

"Nobody is," I protested.

"I want to be," he murmured. He put his head on his knees, and I reached up and touched his cheek, urging him to me.

"You're perfect for me," I replied, and the size of his smile stole my breath.

Staring up at the needle of the steeple, I didn't realize that Logan had grown silent. He moved his arm, pulling me against his side. I tapped his wrist. "Can you set your watch timer for noon? I need to take my oral chemo then."

"Sure," he said, pressing the buttons on the side of his watch face. The dial clicked as he wound it around the circle of the numbers. "Em and Randa are late."

"Em's plane from Atlanta got delayed. Randa said that she's gone into every shop at the airport and that she's, like, so bored," I mimicked, flipping at my hair. I twisted my head back to look at him. "Dawn thinks that if you and I weren't together, Randa would make a play for you."

He flinched. "Then don't ever leave me. 'Cause that girl would browbeat me into doing whatever she wants, and I would end up her damn slave. She'd put me in a well in her basement."

"'It puts the lotion in the basket,'" I laughed.

"She'd look down at me, stroking J.D., in a coat made of all of the skins of boys that she's dated and destroyed. I'm totally the Catherine—I escaped intact," he grinned. Tilting his head from side to side, he amended, "Randa was really good to me during sophomore year. If it had always been like that…I don't know. It wasn't. We just got too angry at each other to function."

"You should have dated Ry, _Wally_," I teased, giggling as he pulled back his mouth in horror. His arms looped around my legs, tugging them up to my chest, and he lifted the ball of me off of the bench and into his lap. I leaned back into the shirt of his suit, wrapping his tie around my hand. "How was work?"

Logan beamed. "So much fun. Like, I could kiss Coach for suggesting this—all I do all day is play with kids. I can do that."

I bit my lip. "Do they all have cancer?"

"No—today, there was a boy who needed a heart transplant, one who has lupus—it's just the kids in oncology are the ones who are in the play room the most. I'm gonna paint the room next week, so maybe I can enlist Dawn to help. Jeff, too, if he's still around," he added, frowning. "Sharon wants him to go home."

I gasped, knocking my knuckles against his chest. "Jeff _just_ asked me if I'd ever cheat on you. Do you think it's because of the Carol thing? Of course it is," I answered myself. I paused, staring down at my body. "I wonder if you and me are just another dysfunctional couple for Jeff to look at. I mean, his dad and his cheating wife. His mom and her husband with the emotional issues. And now his stepsister, the basketcase who's dragging her husband down into her depression."

He was quiet for a moment before he replied, "Mary Anne, I'm twice your size. You couldn't drag me anywhere."

"I'm coming to your game tomorrow," I announced, and he reeled back, giving me a skeptical look. "No, seriously! I want to see you at your strongest. Maybe steal a little of that."

"Well, okay, but if I hear you bitch once about me being mean, I'm ejecting your hot ass," Logan warned.

I grinned. "I'm the hot sister, right?"

"No question," he said, sweeping his hand in front of us. "Though Dawn's got a nice—"

"Stop!" I squeaked, slapping a hand over his mouth. "Ew, that's so wrong. She's my sister, and you're married."

"I'm married, but I'm not dead," he teased, rubbing his nose against my neck. "You should see the other volunteer in the playroom—she's a babe, y'all."

"You are so not funny," I spat, putting my hands around his neck and shaking him gently.

"Tighter, tighter, kill, kill!" Miranda yelled. I spun around, seeing her in front of a cab as Emily slid out of the back seat behind her. I screamed, jumping to my feet. I ignored the fatigue, the hurt, and the whirling feeling in my stomach, and ran to my friends. I barreled right into Miranda's arms, and she rocked me back and forth; I felt Emily lean into us, and I opened my arms to her, too.

"I'm so glad you guys are here," I whispered, kissing both of their faces.

Our feet tangled up in each other, and we began lurching around like an unbalanced metronome. "Oh, Maybelle," Emily sighed. "You look terrible."

"Tired," Miranda added, her fingers tangled in my hair. "For someone who lives in her bed, you look way too tired."

I flinched, pressing harder against them. "It's been hard."

"We know," Miranda said, her arm like steel on my back. "But we're gonna help you make it better."

Promise? We pulled back a few inches, and I grabbed Emily's hair. "You're blonde again—it looks fabulous."

"Everyone in Arizona is blonde. I swear, it's ridiculous. Didn't you notice that when you visited? That I was the only non-blonde?" Emily whined, squirming her body.

I snickered, "You sound like Mallory Pike."

"Whoa, freak show," Miranda snorted. "I saw her at the grocery store last week—I swear, her hair is breeding."

I threw my head back and laughed as the cabbie put the last bag on the sidewalk. Emily handed him some money, and she grabbed her suitcase. "Where's the monster Buick?" she asked.

"Dawn and Jeff have it right now—they went to the mall," I answered. "We have Logan's car."

Miranda narrowed her eyes. "Why aren't they here?"

"Logan didn't want them to be—he was really big on this being private. Just us," I said, pointing at the two of them, at my husband still sitting on the bench. I waved him over, and the moment he reached us, he tugged Emily's hair.

"You're blonde again!" he exclaimed.

"You're so observant," Miranda clucked. She thrust a suitcase at him. "Go, dispose of these."

Emily took in a breath in a loud snore. "I can handle my own bags. Come, Lee, let us talk about the state of the world. Or, how in the hell did the Suns blow it?"

"The who now?" I hissed at Miranda as the two of them walked away with their bags.

She rolled her eyes and put her arm around me as we walked to the church. I grabbed my bag off of the bench, and Miranda's mouth wobbled when she saw the flag. "Okay, no crying," she said, shaking her head. "Um, happy thought, happy thoughts…I saw a really hot guy on the plane? And then he started kissing the guy next to him. They're always gay, aren't they?"

I nodded. "That's usually how it works."

"Emily drew up an agenda for the week—we have so much to do. We want to go dancing tonight, though—experience Request Night. I have a need to shake my booty to 'Pour Some Sugar on Me,' and it must be fulfilled," she declared.

"I had a really bad start to the morning," I admitted. "And the chemo? I may not be able to last long."

Miranda poked me hard in the shoulder. "May, you are not going to give in to the cancer and stuff. You are going to fight back. And the best way to show that you're strong? Is getting your groove thing on. Holla." She raised her fist in the air as we crossed the threshold. I giggled as she looked around. "Just remind me—you did not get married here, right?"

"No. At the tree, and by the reverend who is his team's chaplain. I couldn't do the whole Catholic deal. I kinda feel like I'm a sinner whenever I interact with his church," I whispered, looking around the great hall.

"Are you kidding? I'm surprised the Jew Alert hasn't sounded. Me bursting into flames or whatever," she added in a low tone, examining her arms.

"Yeah, that comes later. Then we roast marshmallows on you," I informed her with a grave bob of my head.

Miranda yanked my arm. "Oh, you're coming with me, Miss Pre-Marital Sex. We'll set ourselves up with a nice little bungalow in the eighth circle of hell? Wine coolers, saying hey to Nixon—hey, hey, hey, Dick," she sang, waving to the distance. "Cool kids go to hell. Boring people like Logan and his sister go to heaven."

"I'm a cool kid," I purred, snapping my fingers and then sliding my hand in the air like a surfboard. Miranda bent over in laughter, and we threw our arms around each other again.

"What's so funny?" Emily hissed, coming up behind us.

"We're going to hell," I replied, keeping my arm around Miranda's waist.

"Bitchin'," she said, and then she slapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh, shit—shit! I did it again!" She glanced around. "Okay, anyone else expecting the Sin Alarm to start ringing?"

Miranda giggled, "Sin Alarm, Jew Alarm—this place really needs to work on their Holy Alert System."

"Will you guys stop it?" Logan hissed, walking past us to the basin of holy water and bending down to cross himself. "This is a sacred place."

Emily and Miranda wiggled their fingers at each other, their eyes too wide, and I chomped hard on my tongue to not laugh. "Seriously," I managed, waving them both forward. "You girls are a bad influence."

"Thank goodness," Miranda sighed, nuzzling against Emily.

We walked up the aisle, past the row of heavy wood pews, empty and waiting for bodies, warm bodies, to fill them. People of faith, coming here in search of a comfort in the leather bound books, from the large crucifix suspended high in the alcove at the front of the church under the large circle window showing the Ascension in a rainbow of colors. The sun struck the glass, sending a prism of light down on the quiet church, and it dazzled like light on water. My eyes caught on the ledge of prayer candles, mostly dark, but a dozen were burning bright, their flames dancing in the breeze of us as we passed by.

Prayers, these expressions of hope that we could see. I broke away from Emily and Miranda and walked over to the candles, taking a match and lighting three. One for each of my babies. And one for Barbara.

Not for me.

By the time I joined my friends at the front of the church, Logan was introducing them to his priest, an older man with a shock of snow-colored hair. Father Joseph took my hands in his and laid a paper-thin kiss on my cheek.

"The congregation prayed for you on Sunday," he said. "I hope it brings you comfort."

"I appreciate that," I said, looking at our hands.

"Is everyone here?" he asked, glancing at the four of us.

Logan and I nodded. "We didn't want to make a big fuss," he shrugged. "Especially since this isn't really orthodox."

"There is no one way to say goodbye," the priest answered, shaking his head. "Did you want the Communion?"

"If that's okay with you?" Logan asked, twisting his hands together, and the priest nodded, gesturing to the closed door in the back and excusing himself to gather what he needed. Logan looked at the three of us. "You guys can just, like, chill during that. It's the eucharist part."

"The bread and the wine?" Emily asked. "Yeah, I'll skip that. There's only so much churching that I can take."

"Also? You can't. You have to accept the dogma and—what the hell?" Logan snapped, looking at the back of the church. His mouth screwed up into a tight ball as he glared at Stacey, Dawn, Jeff, and Kerry making their way up to us. "You're supposed to be in Huntersville," he told his sister, his voice thick with anger.

"Pierce drove me to Charlotte, and I hopped the train to Durham. They picked me up," she explained, pointing at the others. "Come on, do you really think I wouldn't be here?"

"Or us," Stacey added, reaching forward to straighten Logan's tie. "Seriously, Lo, you and Mary Anne may think that you're the only ones who are hurting from what happened. All of us not only want to say goodbye, but we want to be there for the two of you." She glanced at Emily and Miranda. "They are really annoying sometimes."

"We know," Miranda smiled, rubbing my back, as Erin and Jeremy slipped in to the church.

"I didn't want everybody in our business," Logan mumbled, crossing his arms over his chest. "When we had things like this for Mom and stuff, it was always just us."

"Well, that's because Mom didn't have any friends in Stoneybrook," Kerry retorted. "And because she was so sad, she couldn't even function. You two have really great friends, you can't ignore them." She put her hand on his arm, but he stepped back.

Erin gave me a hug and whispered, "Um, he better get okay with people in his grill 'cause Shawn called up the whole team to have them come."

I winced, rocking back on my heels and taking Logan by the hand, walking a few steps away from the huddle of people, from the introductions between my old friends and new. "Angel, what's wrong?"

"I don't like people seeing me cry," he whispered, staring at the altar. Not at me. "I'm gonna cry, and I hate—I'm never ashamed to cry, okay, but it's always just with you. You're a safe place for me, I can be, like, weak and stuff, and you're just always good to me, okay? This is different." As he noticed his friends walking in, he mouthed a curse and turned away, his back to all of the people. "I didn't want them all here because—you're doing this for me, right, except for the part with Em and Randa, this is for me. And I wanted to be able to be me, one hundred percent. The guy I am with you. I wanted to be able to grieve," he finished, swiping at his eyes, "Fuck. Oh, shit, and now I just swore in church."

I kissed his hand. "You swore three times. That first one was silent, but God heard it."

"Thanks, _tesorina_," he smarmed, wiping his face again.

"You can grieve however you want to. If that makes you embarrassed? You have to know that anyone who really loves you understands that it's not weak to hurt. When you hurt bad enough, you cry. If anyone questions your strength, then they have to deal with me, because I think you're the strongest, bravest person I know," I stated, letting my thumb travel over his knuckles.

He sighed. "Thank you." He leaned over and kissed the top of my head. "I love you, Mary Anne."

"I love you, husband." I let out a breath and turned around, curling his arm around my shoulders, and I gasped. "Dr. Paves," I managed, rushing from Logan down the aisle to where my therapist stood with Eddie waiting behind her. "Why are you here?"

"Yelena got a job at the University of Minnesota, and she's very depressed about leaving North Carolina, so the call came out to comfort my poor, freaked out niece. I have nothing to do since SHS ended. So, I'm here," she smiled. "Well, that's a bit of a lie. I was planning on coming down next week, but Sharon called me. Said you didn't want her to come? And she figured, maybe who you needed was me."

"Oh, I'm just here to see that bridesmaid I met," Eddie chimed in. "I think this one's a keeper."

"You always say that," I sniffed, moving from her hug to his. "You think every one is The One."

"They all are. And then I get to know them," he sighed, winking at me. "Oh, Mary Anne, we've got stuff to talk about, don't we." I started to cry, and he pulled me closer. "It's okay."

"It's not okay," I insisted. "I can't make it okay anymore."

"Not on your own you can't," Dr. Paves answered, touching my back. "Come on, why don't you wipe your eyes on my hankie and settle down. After the service, the three of us will get some lunch and discuss, sound good?"

I nodded, dabbing at my eyes. I scooted from them and sat down in the first pew next to Dawn. She took my hand firmly between hers, and I could feel the blood rushing in the veins of her palms. Holding me tight against her love line. Her life line. I glanced behind me at Miranda and Emily and Stacey, Erin and Jeremy, behind them a row stuffed with ten of Logan's friends, all so tall and somber in their dark suits. Logan was standing in the aisle, the gray head of his Coach bobbing as they talked. The man that he loved like a father. Coach should be here, I realized.

Just like they should be here, I thought, staring back at Dr. Paves and Eddie in the last pew of our group, Eddie's face breaking into a smile as he texted someone on his phone.

I turned back, and Miranda put her head on my shoulder, Emily arm snaking around my body to hold my other hand. I let our shared bundle of fingers move up to cover my heart. Logan moved past Kerry to sit next to me, and he didn't move to disentangle that hand; he just put his fingers on my knee and let his left hand meet Kerry's. We were all family, all of us.

"Good morning," Father Joseph said with a small smile as he walked in front of us. He put a lectern in front of him with a bundle of papers and a copy of the Bible. "I wasn't expecting a crowd, but I think that speaks to how much love there truly is for the people in our lives. And how it cannot be hidden in times of need."

Dawn squeezed my hand, and I sniffed again, giving her a smile.

"It is difficult to find an adequate way to mourn in a situation like this—to love someone so deeply that you have never met, how can you say goodbye to him?" the priest asked. "I hope that what we read and say today brings comfort to those of you in pain, but the greatest healing comes from opening your heart to God and to others, for God lives in our love for our fellow man."

"Sing it, Church Guy," Miranda whispered in my ear, and I let out a little gasp of a giggle. I heard Emily smack her on the arm, and I tried not to laugh again.

"We will begin with a reading from Ecclesiasticus 38:19." There was a rustle of Bibles pulled from the rows on the back of the pews. I opened my book to the verse and read along with the priest as he said, "'For of sadness cometh death, and it overwhelmeth the strength, and the sorrow of the heart boweth down the neck. In withdrawing aside sorrow remaineth: and the substance of the poor is according to his heart. Give not up thy heart to sadness, but drive it from thee: and remember the latter end. Forget it not: for there is no returning, and thou shalt do him no good, and shalt hurt thyself.'"

I am hurt. I am doing myself no good. But I don't know how to let go.

There were other readings, one from the Gospel, one from a poem that I had found in my old A.P. Lit textbook. _And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night._ More hurt. More ache. The armies in me. _For the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams/So various, so beautiful, so new/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain._ Help me, I can't live like this anymore. I put my hand on my belly—I can't take care of you if I feel like this.

_Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!_ I put my hand in Logan's, and he clutched at his lower lip with his teeth. Hiding the truth.

There was Communion, which only Kerry, Logan, Dr. Paves, and Eddie received. There was a homily, there was the expression of peace. Emily and Miranda stood and recited the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer of mourning. I wept into my hands as I heard the sounds of a different congregation in Tel Aviv reciting it years ago, over a coffin draped in a flag that now belonged to me. And then, there was the moment that I had been dreading. That had reduced me into a sobbing mass on Sunday night, when we decided. When we chose.

"And so," the priest said, "We ask you, Our Father, to open your arms to your child, Richard Timothy, and keep him in thy love and thy grace, Amen."

Dawn's mouth tipped open. "You named him Richard."

I swallowed, struggling against the tears marching up my throat. My baby has a name. My baby that I never met, that I'll never see, he has a name. And it shone on the priest's lips like gold, tarnishing there as it hung in the air. My baby has a name that I will never use to call him to dinner, to yell at him when he's running into the street to retrieve a ball. To whisper in his ear when he needs comfort.

To say before the words, _I love you. _

I looked at my sister and breathed, "Do you think Dad will love me now?"


	17. Chapter 15

I balled my fingers into fists and pressed them against my temples. "I don't feel very well," I mumbled, leaning forward into the air conditioning vent.

Emily reached forward over the headrest. "You feel like you're gonna puke?"

"Yeah," I answered, tipping my forehead against the dashboard.

"Should we stop? Logan, pull over," Miranda ordered, tapping him on the shoulder from her place in the backseat.

I shook my head a bit. "No, no, we're almost home. Just get me home," I asked, resting my hand on top of his, his knuckles bright as he clutched the stick shift. He caught my fingers between his, squeezing them, but he kept looking forward through the windshield. I stared down at his hand, at the healing cuts on his fingers, the skin growing back from where he had scraped them somehow.

From a game, I assumed. I pressed my skin harder against the plastic of the car and hoped that the cold air could blast this nausea away. Take it away, take it from me.

When we reached the house, Logan got out of his seat and held it forward for the girls to climb out of the car. He leaned across the bench to me and asked, "Mary Anne? Can you get out okay?"

"I'm dizzy," I sighed, bracing myself against the glove box.

"Well, wait there," he said, coming around the car and opening the door. One of his hands wrapped around my back while the other went under the bend of my knees, and he lifted me up into his arms. "Don't puke on me, deal?" he said, hitching me higher in his grip and walking us to the house. "Emily, can you get some fizzy soda, like 7-Up? The kitchen is in the back of the house. And Randa, can you follow me upstairs and wet a washcloth for her forehead?"

"Gotcha," Miranda answered, holding the door open for us. I curled against his chest, closing my eyes as the rhythm of us moving up stairs made my stomach lurch, my head twirl in an unbalanced wobble. By the time he laid me on the bed, I felt my body spinning in one direction and the room hurtling off in another. I kept my eyes clenched tight as he clanked the garbage can down next to me.

"This dress is too tight," I said, tugging at its waist.

The dresser drawers clanked open and shut. "Can you sit?" he asked, and I hauled myself up, eyes still closed. "Is it making you sick, to open your eyes/"

"Yeah," I said, a cry catching in that word. His hand touched my face, rubbing my lips, and then my dress began moving up my body. "Do you mind helping me?" I tried to keep talking, but I felt like I was going to vomit, so I clamped my mouth shut.

"If it keeps you from puking? Not at all—and don't talk, okay, just relax. Do you mind if Em and Randa come in?" he asked, working the dress off of me, my skin crawling as the cold of the room met my body, fevering with this sickness.

Managing to shake my head, I raised my arms when Logan prodded me to, the soft slip of a large shirt puddling over my torso. "You have really cute underwear today," he whispered in my ear, and the air tasted like his smile. In a loud voice, he said, "You two can come in."

"Uh, duh—we just wanted to make sure she wasn't nekkid," Miranda laughed, and the bed bounced as she sat down next to me. "Here, lie down, May, let me put this over your eyes. Do you still do that breathing exercise? In through the nose, down to the toes, blah blah?"

"Yeah," I whispered, leaning back, still swimming in the darkness of my shut eyes. My head hit the pillow, and I jerked a bit at the cold drip of the washcloth on my face. It was heavy and cool over my eyes, and I took in a deep line of air through my nose. Push the sick feeling out of my stomach, breathe it apart. Push it out. Push it out.

"Do you want me to beg out of lunch with the guys?" Logan asked, rubbing my hands. "I will. If you want me to stay."

Emily made a small grunt. "Dude, we know how to handle chemo. Give your woman a kiss, and get out of here. The best medicine for this is Sandra Bullock movies, and I doubt you want to be around for that."

"Good call," he said quickly. His lips landed next to my mouth; my hand met his shoulder, pulling him in to press down on me. "Call me if you need me, otherwise I'll be home for dinner. Guys, all of my info is in her day planner, if—"

"For the love of crack, Lee, we know the drill—you act as though May never talks to us!" Emily laughed. "Get out before I have Randa kick your ass."

"Put 'em up, bitch," Miranda barked.

He kissed me again and then the heat of his body fell away as he left the bed. "Love you, pretty girl," he called, and the door clicked shut.

I opened my mouth, but that sick feel charged up my throat again. Emily touched my legs. "Just rest, May. Oh, come _on_, Randa, not _The Lake House_. I can't take Keanu—this trash can acts better than him. Put in _While You Were Sleeping_."

"Is the Tenacious D movie his? Of course it is—I'm so proud! I introduced him to the D," Miranda glowed, and I heard the DVD player whirring, clicking open and then closed as she put in a new movie. "Once upon a time, he was the Wonder Boy to my Nasty Man."

"Of course you were," Emily giggled. "When I'm having a really bad day at the _Times_, I totally queue up 'Tribute'—'Be you angels? And we said _Nay_, we are but men!'"

"'Rock!'" Miranda yelled, and they exploded into laughter again. Barbara and I didn't understand some of the things that Miranda and Emily found funny—we'd listen and give each other bewildered looks as the two of them cackled over _Robot Chicken_ or a copy of _The Oblongs_ book.

"Sometimes, I think their cigarettes are laced with crazy in the filters," Barbara would whisper, and then _we_ would laugh, our heads tipping together, the vibration of her giggles sliding under my skin.

"I want my flag," I whispered. Miranda rustled around in my purse, and the light fabric was soon on my body, followed by the soft butter feel of my fleece blanket. A moment later, I felt the wriggling body of J.D. leaping onto the bed and crawling against me.

"Nuh uh, puppy, Mommy's not feeling good," Miranda scolded, and I heard the snapping of my dog's mouth. "Come sit with Auntie Randa. Ems, I don't want to watch the previews, girl. Fast forward is your friend."

"Oh, my God," Emily gasped, flopping on the other side of me. "Did I tell you? My one roommate, the whore from Pepperdine? She went to the premiere of the new Cam Geary movie, and guess whose latest trip to rehab sure didn't do him a shitload of good?"

"No," Miranda breathed.

"Yes," Emily squealed. "She totally saw him snorting coke off of the bathroom counter. Like, ew!" She brushed her hand over my arm. "And you used to be obsessed with him, May. Seriously."

I let out a quiet murmur, tipping my head. I grew out of that. I grew out of a lot of things. A lot of people, too—Kristy Thomas, Mallory Pike. Left things behind. For good, for bad.

Miranda and Emily were talking above me, but their legs were pressed close to my sides, making a cradle and holding me in. The heat of them, their words and their bodies, made me sleepy, and I rocked down into the dizziness and let myself sleep.

My eyes opened. Miranda and Emily were gone, but Barbara and my mother were sitting on the foot of the bed, watching me. I rubbed at my eyes and pushed the covers off of me, and I saw myself in my red dress, my prom dress, wedding dress. The dress I wore when I lost my virginity. When I died. For the first time? Flat stomach, round breasts—back to who I used to be. To who I had left behind.

Barbara spun her engagement ring around her finger as she looked at me. "Hey, Maybelle." She looked at my mother. "Mary Anne has a lot of nicknames—May, Maybelle, _tesorina_, Tess, and, of course, pretty girl—just tons of them."

"Dad calls me Annie sometimes," I whispered, crawling down to them. I put my head on Mom's shoulder. "Dad hates me. He never talks to me. All he does is pay the medical bills—and he didn't even tell us that he would keep doing that. Just one day, I got an insurance statement that said _paid_. That's all. That's all he's giving me, Mom."

Mom straightened the skirt of her blue dress, folding her legs together. The red ledge of her toenails poked out from under the drape of the navy fabric. She pulled a large plastic box onto the bed and began pulling its contents out, spreading them amongst the three of us. A towel with a duck head, a tiny pair of pajamas, a stuffed horse with fur as soft as spring rain, picture books. _Guess How Much I Love You_. To the moon and back.

"Baby things have gotten so much cuter since you were small," Mom smiled, running her hands over the duck towel. "I love the little footies that have hoods on them? With the animal ears. Those are adorable."

I grabbed her wrist. "Will I get to use these? Or not. Is my baby going to make it?"

Mom blinked, still petting the towel. I looked at Barbara, and she puckered her mouth in a sad circle. "I'm sorry, May."

"You're sorry, why? Because you can't tell me or because the baby doesn't make it?" I said, my hands shaking on my mother's skin.

"Yes," she said, tucking her fingers into her curls.

I rubbed my face, and I realized that my rings were gone. I stared at my left hand, and I felt so naked that I clutched my arms over my chest. Everything had grown so quiet; I could hear the sounds of people outside, a low surf of words overlapping and pushing up against the windows that faced the backyard. I noticed the clock on the wall had stopped—seven-oh-three. The room seemed empty without its ticking, the constant click of its voice.

"How's my baby," I asked, looking between the two of them.

Barbara smiled, taking my hand and leading me across the hall to Stacey and Dawn's room. Dawn's and Jeff's room. No, none of the above—a nursery with sun-bright walls, circus animals dancing—they were painted so beautifully, they looked professional. I glanced at the corner of the south and east walls and stared at the _CK_ scrawled under a large and merry elephant. Under the window was a bassinet, lacy and frilly, shockingly feminine with its pink ribbon.

But the baby in it wore blue. I reached down and gathered him in my arms. "Hi, Rick," I murmured, rubbing his back. "Richard. My sweet boy, how are you?"

His mouth formed the shape of a grape and then closed again. He looked so much like me—the brown eyes, the overripe lips, the way his ears were flat against his head. There wasn't much of Logan at all in his face—but his hands, the delicate bones of his long fingers, his hollowed palm: these were my lover's hands.

"Who were you going to be?" I asked him, stroking his back. "What would you have done with your life, Richard? Rick. That's what your daddy already called you, when we picked that name. It's my father's name." I took in a breath, sweet with the scent of baby powder and lotion and the pink of his new skin. "I love my father almost as much as I love you." My voice grew heavy and wet. "I miss him, Rick."

"Your father used to walk you around the house singing Paul McCartney songs," my mother said, coming into the room. "Not John Lennon—Rich thought he was too 'out there.' But Macca—your father loved how much Paul could express love. Rich was never very good at saying how much he loved people. Everyone he loved died."

"His father, his mother, you," I said, holding my baby closer. Richard: he had a name.

"Sharon was taken away from him, his brother was killed in Vietnam—Rich never talked about him, did he?" Mom said, tipping her head to look at the baby, her long brown hair sweeping down off of her shoulder. "He grew up in a house just crawling with grief—the only person who reached him was Sharon, and then they ended, too. Your father isn't the man he is because he is evil or cruel. It is because he is terrified and hurt."

"But you reached him," I pressed.

"And then I hurt him so bad, he shut down for a year and a half. I hurt him worse than a gunshot or a slap on the face," she said, stroking her hand over Richard's head.

"Not all people are as good as you and me at saying how much we love," Barbara added, coming up behind me. She moved her hands down my own long hair. "It's like, what happened in my life with my own parents made me appreciate love, not be scared of it. And what happened with you and your dad led you to crave love."

I rubbed my baby's back and admitted, "I'm scared that I want to be a mom so badly that I'm losing sight of everything else."

"You need to go back on your meds, May," Barbara said, putting her hand on mine, sinking our palms against the baby. "Prozac, right? You're in the second trimester, it's safe now."

"It's not safe—they don't know what it does," I protested. "It can increase the risk of miscarriage, I can't go through this again."

"You don't want to die again, either," Barbara replied. Our foreheads leaned together as she whispered, "You don't want to be with me, May. I miss Nick so much, my blood hurts. I miss you so much, I ache all day. My sister—I want Celia." Her eyes clouded with tears, and she shook her body.

"Are you sad that you died?" I asked, my voice so low that I barely heard it.

"I'm proud of how," Barbara declared, straightening her shoulders. "But I don't want to be dead. I love you, Mary Anne, but I don't want you with me and Amelia."

"Why haven't you come back to me?" I blurted out, shifting the baby to the other side of my chest. "I wait for you every day, why haven't you come?"

Barbara blushed. "I lose track of time with Amelia usually." She pushed out her lower lip, running her teeth along its fleshy rim. "Though—I've been scared that if I came, I'd never leave. Or that you'd never move on. Nicky didn't move on. He won't." Her eyes spilled over as she looked back at me. "He's becoming like your dad, and it's killing me. It's killing me all over again. I can't come back because I'm so scared that I'll see you or Emmy or Randa suffering, too. I'm sorry, May, I'm sorry."

She spun around from me and walked to the windows. My mother joined her, so I followed, too. Down in the yard were all of my friends, my family, milling around in dark clothes we wore this morning. For the mourning. The grill was smoking, and Logan's friends were huddled around it. I thought they went out to lunch? No, they were here. And so were the friends from my dorm—Jenny and Marissa and Steffie and Mel and Dianna. Why were they here? There, on the hammock: Dawn and Stacey, their arms around my husband's back. His hands were covering his face, and I could see on the smallest finger of his left hand, the sparkle of a stone,

My engagement ring.

"This is my funeral," I realized. "This is for me."

The sky bruised, sweeping over in black and dark, angry blues and purples. The wind began to howl, brushing skirts with its violent hand. I stood there, staring, as the wind whipped into a funnel, sweeping all of my friends up in its dirty cone, stripping the yard of the chairs and the table, everything, everything, gathered in the mouth of the tornado. Their screams—their screams were worse than any sound I had ever heard.

When the wind stopped, all of their bodies were littered in the yard, broken and ruined and dropped down.

Like the baby falling from my arms. I covered my own face and began to scream. When I looked back at Barbara, at my mother and my baby, they were gone. The yard was empty—everything, everything was gone.

And I was alone.

I slammed out of my dream, my eyes popping open. The room was dark, and Emily and Miranda were gone—I pinched the skin on my arm, just be sure that I was awake this time. There was a bite of pain—yes. Yes, I am awake. Yes, I am here.

A figure in the arm chair stirred. "You're awake," Dr. Paves said, standing and coming over to me. "Stacey and Jeremy are almost finished with dinner—you feel well enough to eat?"

I sat up, surveying my body. The dizziness was gone, the vomit feel was gone. "Yeah, I think so," I said, rubbing my eyes. "What time is it?"

"Almost six. Eddie's off with his little girlfriend until supper, but otherwise, we're all here." Her hand touched my face, and all I could see was my mother. "Mary Anne."

My eyes crumbled, and I began to sob. "I need help—I'm sad and tired all the time, my mind is just so exhausted, I can't get anything done anymore. I feel like I'm losing myself. And my baby's gone, he's gone."

"I know," she said, curling her arms around me.

"And I'm…Logan picked me on Friday, he picked me," I cried. "He had them give me blood thinners so I wouldn't throw a clot in my heart again, and it might be why I miscarried, and I—I'm glad he picked me." I pressed my eyes so hard against the hard bone of her shoulder that white poppies exploded in my eyes. "I'm so glad he picked me, and now my baby's gone, and I still—I'm so glad that he picked me. I feel like such a bad person, Ana, I can't stand it."

"There's nothing wrong with wanting to live," Dr. Paves told me in a sharp tone. "Love is sacrifice, Mary Anne. Life is sacrifice. You know this."

I pulled back and nodded. "I do. It's like, I have these moments? Like the sun is shining, and I'm able to remember things. Like no dying. Like how I promised that I'd end the pregnancy if it was too risky, how I swore that I wouldn't let myself go down too far. And then it just goes away. I have barely gotten out of bed since I got back from the hospital on Sunday. Everybody's life is revolving around me, and I hate it. Logan's walking on eggshells, he keeps pulling out that note card that Sarah had him write about how to deal with me—I can see him struggling, and—when I told him? That was glad that he made that choice? It was like he physically got lighter, twenty pounds lifted off of his shoulders lighter. I'm hurting him so much."

I bit my lip and let my hands fall into hers. "You know how you said that what breaks up most couples is the thing that usually brought them together? He said that he fell in love with me because I was the first person in years to make him feel like he was good enough, just who he was. To _see_ him. I'm scared that I'm making him feel worthless again because he blames himself for getting me pregnant, and he blames himself for me hurting like this." I looked at her from the bottom of my eyes and admitted, "I'm scared he'll stop loving me if I keep making him feel like this. Or worse—that he'll stay with me because he feels obligated. Like with his mom."

Dr. Paves twisted her mouth back and forth. "Well, I can understand that. And I still believe that. Next to money, that's the biggie why couples split. But—" She turned our hands upside down and then righted them again. "I can't see him falling out of love with you. And I think that he's secure enough in who he is to not be shaken by your difficulties—and that is in large part due to your support, _mija_. However, I can see him just destroying himself with guilt. I think the person you need to talk to about this is _him_, not me. Keeping the lines of communication open is key in any relationship, but especially in a marriage."

"He's my best friend," I said. "Without Barbara around anymore, he's pretty much the person I tell everything to."

"Except this," she said, raising her eyebrows. "The most important thing. Just stay honest with each other, even if it hurts."

"I miss Babs," I whimpered, burying my face in my hands. "She always knew exactly what to do. She knew me."

Her hands were firm on my wrists, pulling my hands down. "_You_ know you. It's time to trust yourself again, May, got me?" She took a deep breath. "I understand why you can't turn to Sharon right now—your father and all. Her presence denotes his absence, of course. But…" Dr. Paves sighed, pulling her fingers through her hair. "You're my favorite, okay? You are. You leaving my care has been the best thing for me since I can see you as a friend, like a niece or a daughter. I can stop worrying about overstepping my boundaries with you. But I can't do this all the time, come down when you're sinking. This could happen again and again, and I can't do it each time. Especially because I might be leaving."

"What do you mean?" I gasped.

She gave me a dry smile. "Rafi's been offered a job. With the University of Washington out in Seattle—an associate professorship. It's a great deal more money. We are also coffee nerds. It's a good combination," she declared.

"And you can't just fly here from Seattle," I murmured.

"No, I can't." Dr. Paves licked her lips and inhaled hard through her nose. "Mary Anne, you're sick. On many different fronts, you are sick. But under it all is a quite capable and very intelligent young lady. It's time to access her. You know how. I'm sure you and Sarah have talked this out, and touch back on ninth grade. Fight _back_, you get me? And be strong enough to do what you have to in order to live."

I breathed in and nodded at her. "Okay."

She touched my cheek, and it felt like a kiss. "I wanted to be here Friday night, you know. The moment Sharon called. And I'll want to be here every time things go wrong, you know that. But I need you to be able to help yourself. And you know how—and you need to go back on your meds. Eddie brought some samples of Prozac to tide you over until you can fill a prescription."

"Okay," I said.

We held tight to each other for a moment, and then she helped me up. "Oh, hold on. Stacey McGill says that this is a formal dinner—she is forcing everyone to dress up like it's summer prom or something."

"What!" I giggled.

Dr. Paves nodded gravely. "She and Dawn and Jeremy decided that we were going to celebrate Emily and Miranda's arrival and make an real event out of the meal, and…well, I think it's just an excuse for Dawn to wear some red dress she bought at the mall today. Stacey said she'll come up and help you change—I'll go get her."

"Stacey shouldn't be encouraged," I grumbled.

"And yet, all of you continue to let her be your sartorial Stalin. My darling, we in the business call that 'enabling,'" she noted, tapping my shoulder. She winked at me and slipped out the door. I stood up, walking over to the closet and flipping through the dresses in the back until my fingers wrapped over the sleeve of a black dress—my Homecoming dress.

I closed my eyes and I could smell it. That scent, strawberries and lilies. Because…what had she done…_Barbara put on her perfume…_

Barbara spritzed perfume on her wrists and waved them in the air until they dried. "Everybody looks so good!" she squealed, hopping back onto the bed.

"Don't shake the mattress, honey," Sharon warned, smudging the liner around Emily's hazel eyes. She licked her finger and corrected the mark. "Mary Anne, can you hand me the eyelash curler, please?"

I reached back to my desk, whirling around in the desk chair to face Sharon again. I handed her the curler and clapped my hands. "Emmy, Tucker is gonna die, you look so good!"

"Just wait until I'm done," Sharon smiled, pressing down on Emily's eyelashes.

Miranda curled her legs under her body, settling father back into my armchair. "I think this is my favorite part of any dance—the primping. And, like, we could totally do our own makeup? But it's fun to have someone else do it."

"Randa, no offense?" Stacey called from the bathroom. "But you cannot do it yourself. We are professionally trained in the makeup arts, you need to realize this." There was a squeal, and Stacey snapped, "Dawn! Hold still or else I'll burn your ear again!"

"Mom, Stacey is abusing me," Dawn whined.

Sharon clucked her tongue. "Girls, please. Dawn, sack it up. Stacey, this is Homecoming, not Fashion Wars. Relax."

"Relax," Stacey snorted. Her voice echoed against the hard tiled room. "May, you haven't touched your face, right?"

I patted my cheeks with hesitant fingers. "I swear, I have done nothing to hurt your hard work, Stace." I rolled my eyes at Miranda, and she lolled her tongue out of her mouth, yanking above her head on an imaginary noose. I whipped a finger at her and forced myself not to giggle.

Dad knocked at the door, trilling, "Ladies? Are you decent?"

"Richie, we aren't done," Sharon whined. "We'll be down when the girls are all finished."

"Well, Dawn and Stacey's dates are here. Maureen and I can only entertain them for so long," he warned. "I'm not sure how to converse with unfamiliar high school boys. If they want to discuss sports, we might run out of conversation post haste."

"What about golf? You love golf, all guys love Tiger Woods. Logan says that Tiger is a universal sports icon. Whether or not you like golf, everybody has an opinion on him," I suggested.

Dad was quiet for a moment. "Excellent idea. That can be our emergency plan." He pushed the door open a bit. "Can I get a peek?"

"No!" I squealed, jumping up and scooting my hip against the door. "You have to wait, Daddy."

Sharon uncapped a thin red pencil and traced the line of Emily's lips. "Where are your boys, oh Sisterhood?"

"Tucker's probably lost," Emily said when Sharon lowered the pencil. "I swear, the guy is so bad with directions, it's incredible. He can't even find the way to the bottom of his bellybutton."

I giggled as Miranda added, "He redefines pathetic, Sharon. He got lost between here and Washington Mall. And it's a freakin' straight line between here and there." She stretched her arms above her head, the yellow sleeves on her dress shaking like leaves in the wind. "Tim's taking the train, and he's relying on May's heap of lame to pick him up at the station."

"Stop it," I snapped, chucking a tube of mascara at her.

"Yeah, that's my date you're ripping on," Barbara agreed, jumping back to her feet. She spun around in a circle, making her skirt twist around her body in a sky blue blur. "I am so excited!"

"You are so Homecoming Queen," Emily announced, sticking her fist in the air. "Right, Stace?"

"Uh, yeah?" Dawn replied. "Stace'll take SHS apart brick by brick if people don't choose you. Dude, Babs, you're co-captain of the poms squad. It's so a given."

"Yeah, but Cokie's always a threat," Miranda grumbled. "We should have had her taken out like Tonya Harding did Nancy Kerrigan." She mimed slamming a rod against her knee and then clutched at her leg, moaning, "Why? Why me!"

"Because you suck, Cokie," Emily cackled. Sharon tapped her shoulder, and Emily sprung up to run into the bathroom. "Oh, my gosh, Sharon! It looks incredible!"

"Thank you, Emily," Sharon smiled, putting the lipstick back in her makeup case. "Stacey, Dawn, honestly, you better head downstairs."

Dawn marched into my room with a head full of curlers, the white satin of her dress sticking to each curve of her body. "Mom. Waiting on a girl is an essential life lesson for all boys to learn. If they want us all hot, then they have to appreciate the effort that we undergo to conform to society's unrealistic beauty paradigm."

Sharon blinked. "That's it, I'm canceling your subscription to _Bust_."

Dawn stuck her tongue out at her mother and ducked back into the bathroom. I grabbed my stepmother's arm as she walked to the door, standing up next to her. "Sharon? I look okay, right?"

"You're a babe, May," Miranda announced, but I stared at my stepmother. I needed her words. I needed her to validate me—to mother me.

Sharon's fingers touched the top of the turtleneck, her hands drifting down my arms, the black fabric that covered me all the way down to the tight cuffs that ended at my wrists. She held my left hand, letting my right arm drift down, the tips of those fingers brushing against the hem of the dress. The only part of me you could see, my legs, the only part of me that was normal. Almost—still too skinny, the muscles of my calves and thighs so withered. I was a broken line of black and skin, a wig on my head to cover the weak inch of oil-colored hair on my scalp.

Did I look okay. Did I look normal. Normal enough.

Sharon touched my wig, the way that Stacey had parted it on the side and tucked a red flower into the twist in the back. "You look lovely, Mary Anne."

"Really?" I pressed.

"Jesus, are you fishing for compliments?" Dawn boomed. "You look so sexy, it'll be a miracle if you keep that dress on all the way until midnight."

"Dawn!" Sharon and I yelled. My stepmother gave me an exasperated look, but she laid a kiss on the side of my face, rubbing her thumb along my jaw before tossing me a wink and heading out the door. The moment it clicked shut, I whirled around to face my friends. I whispered, "Do I look too—like—"

"Anorexic?" Miranda sighed. "Naw, May. Just really thin. But the makeup makes you look totally rosy and healthy and stuff. It's actually nice to see you in something other than baggy clothes and shit."

I smiled at her and then jumped up and down. "It's so nice to see us looking so good. You guys! You are so beautiful, you're breaking my heart."

Emily crossed her legs, trapping the green skirt of her dress. "I feel pretty," she sang. "This is so much better than prom last year since we're all together."

Barbara pouted, slumping down into Miranda's lap. "Except Nick. Stupid midterms. How come Tim can come from stupid England, but my own boyfriend can't come from Indiana? Do they not have planes in Indiana?"

"He needs to study," I scolded. "Besides, Logan is going to be the best shared date in the history of ever. Nicky's got him primed. As for Tim—if you try to understand Tim and his motivations, your head will just spin."

Miranda giggled, resting her head on Barbara's elbow. "He's insane. I love it. You know where's he's off to next? Sweden. It must be delightful to be, like, rich and have some posh gap year like he's doing. It's what I don't get about people like Kristy Thomas—you've got all of that coin, why not indulge a bit?"

"Kristy is focused," Dawn said, walking back into my room, the curls around her face bobbing with abandon. "A gap year of travel and shagging everything in sight? Distracts from her goal of taking over the world."

"Though seeing the world would help her understand her future minions," Emily pointed out.

"I'll mention that to her at dinner," Dawn said, waving her hairbrush at us.

"Oh, oh, oh!" Stacey yelled, running into my room in a swirl of grape chiffon. "Theme song ahoy, bitches." She yanked the volume on the stereo up and began to sing, "'Fergalicious definition: make them boys go crazy. They always claim they know me, coming to me, call me Stacey.'"

"'Hey, Stacey,'" Barbara shouted, getting to her feet and dancing with Stacey, bending low on her knees and pushing out her rear end, bobbing her way back up. They moved in unison, snaking their bodies in smooth lines. "This is such a hot routine."

Stacey shook her finger at Barbara. "Sexy mouth, Babs. You gotta be all," she moved her lips into a soft mound and then gaped her mouth open, pushing her lower lip out a bit with her tongue.

"I know, I know," Barbara grumbled. She shrugged and then gasped, grabbing Stacey's arm. "Girl, we gotta get a Lady Sovereign routine, for reals."

Miranda leapt to her feet. "You're so gonna be Homecoming Queen, Babsie!" she crowed, seizing Barbara from behind.

Emily stood up on the bed. "All hail Queen Babs!"

"All hail!" I shouted, fluffing Barbara's curls. She beamed at me, taking my hands and swinging them back and forth. "I'm best friend with the Homecoming Queen. Will you remember us little people?"

"Guys," she giggled, squirming away. "If I am Queen—which is still an _if_, thank you—my first decree is to make today the National Day of the Sisterhood of the Travling Belt."

"Which is so totally adding to my dress," Miranda declared, holding up the brown sash on her gown to show the belt. "You should have worn this, Babsie, then you could have worn the belt."

"Nah, you need it—I mean, you haven't seen Tim in months. This is a big occasion. I have May's boyfriend as my good luck charm," Barbara said, waving her hands.

"Dude, then you're doomed," Miranda sighed.

"Annie?" Dad said, knocking on the door again. I walked over and opened it, and his mouth shook as he looked at me. "Oh, sweetheart. You look wonderful."

"Yeah?" I asked, biting my lip. "Stacey did my makeup."

He pulled me against his body, and I held him close to me, my hands sinking into the softness of his back. This had been the best thing about remission—Dad wasn't afraid to touch me. To show me that he loved me, not just saying it from a distance. I was better, and that was giving me my face back—he was seeing me again, not my mother. As sick as I still was, it wasn't the cancer now. It wasn't that thing that killed her, that tried to kill me. The longer I was well, the closer we could be.

I just had to stay this way. Or else I would lose him again.

Dad sniffed, and I could hear the thickness in his throat as he swallowed. "Sharon said you looked gorgeous, but you know mothers."

I froze. I didn't.

Dad took in a deep breath, trying to leap over that moment by saying, "But she was so right. You're breathtaking, Mary Anne. I'm going to waste a roll of film just on you," he smiled, pulling back so he could look at my face.

"Dad!" I blushed, touching the hair of the wig. "My friends? They are so incredibly stunning tonight, I'm totally not the big deal. We all are."

"I think May's the prettiest," Barbara stated.

"I don't know, I think I'm pretty hot," Emily laughed.

Miranda scoffed, "You want to rumble, Bernstein? I am so the one who's bringing the sexy back tonight."

Dad's face turned red as he watched my friends. "Anyway. Logan and a very strange British gentlemen are downstairs."

"Strange? How strange—dressed strange?" Miranda demanded, coming up beside me. Her voice grew thin as she pressed, "It's not a plaid suit with a vest, is it?"

"With a cane," Dad nodded, and Miranda slapped her forehead with a groan.

I laughed, putting my hand on Dad's arm. "Tell them we'll be down in a minute, Daddy." Straining up on my tiptoes, I kissed his cheek. "I love you."

"I love you, Annie," he murmured, touching my face again. I clutched at his wrist, and my hands felt empty when he pulled away. I turned back into the room to grab my purse.

"Wait, wait," Emily chattered, getting off the bed. She held open her arms and gathered the four of us in a circle. "Okay, so. This is, like, _the_ big dance of the year for seniors. Winter formal, Valentine's Day, prom? Whatever. This is our last night to really shine as the twelfth fucking grade, ladies. And I know we have boys, and I know we have Abby's party where some of us will get blitzed, but I want from now until the time we decide to blow this popsicle stand tonight to be about the four of us."

"Shake some ass and take names," Miranda said, bowing her head, the small yellow flowers in her hair trembling as she danced her head around.

"Have tons of fun," Barbara giggled. "Queen or no, we are going to have such a good time."

"The absolute best," I grinned, tilting my head against hers. "I mean, when you're with your _best_ friends, that's totally implied."

Emily took in a deep breath. "In a year—"

"No!" Miranda cried. "No, no, no! None of that! I refuse to acknowledge that we are splitting up until the day the first one of us leaves. For the love of Jake Gyllenhaal, y'all, you are the most permanent thing in my life. My brother's in China digging up bones, my sister's a horror show, boys are too stupid for me to deal with? It's you guys. I can't deal with the idea of us breaking apart."

I held her tighter. "Randa, we're not breaking apart." I looked at Emily and at Barbara, my _sosia_. "We're together, we're as close as a breath as long as we remember how much we love each other."

"I love you guys," Barbara whispered. "If Nicky left me tomorrow, I know I could find a way to be okay with it if I had you."

My blood slowed, lurching to a halt as I thought, _What if Logan left me?_ Could I be okay? With these girls to hold me up. Emily, so practical; Miranda, so energetic. They could work through any problem, any challenge. But would they be enough? For years, I had leaned on those two, but I always went to _her_ first to break my fall. She always knew how to catch me, even when I was in pieces, and wait for me to find my way back whole again. My eyes traveled to Barbara like a falling star, her face glowing bright in my eyes. Yes, I could be okay if I lost my Logan, I could do anything as long as I had her.

My best friend, my Babsie.

"May?" Stacey said, walking into my bedroom in Stoneybrook.

Walking into my bedroom in Chapel Hill. I shook my head, holding my Homecoming dress to my chest. I looked at her and said, "I know what I'm wearing."

Because I know me best.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Kerry crossed herself and poked her brother. "Uh, you planning on saying grace before you eat? Or is thanking God for His gifts, like, unnecessary?"

Logan scowled, but he crossed himself as well. "Honestly, doesn't it cheapen prayer when it's mandatory?"

"No," she chirped, picking up her fork. "Thank you again for the dress, Dawn."

"My pleasure. We tall girls gotta help a sister out," Dawn grinned. She leaned over the steaming plate of bread and inhaled. "Oh, guys, this is really wonderful looking."

Jeremy glowed, his face mottled in the candlelight. "Thank you, thank you. I must defer to Miss McGill, but I do take total credit for the main course." I rolled my eyes at him, and he scoffed, "Hello? I have an ego to stroke, too."

"So, what is on the menu?" Eddie asked, slipping into the chair at the head of the table.

Dr. Paves snorted, waving her wine glass at him from the other end. "Oh, so, the food pops up, and you tear yourself away from texting the infant."

"She's not an infant!" He looked at me, his mouth slumping. "She's twenty-two and out of college, isn't that old enough?"

"Oh, sure. It's not robbing the cradle—it's more like, tipping it over and encouraging the baby to jailbreak on over to you," Emily laughed, tilting her hands upside down.

Jeremy tapped his glass with an annoyed expression. "We have an herb and greens salad with walnuts and blue cheese vinaigrette, bruschetta with goat cheese for starters. Snaps to Stacey," he commanded.

Stacey fluttered her eyelashes. With a dip of her head, she said, "I can't help being awesome at dumping lettuce and toasting bread."

"What's the stuff that smells like heaven in the kitchen?" Erin prompted.

"Duck comfit with five cheese ravioli—what!" Jeff exclaimed, staring at Jeremy. "I totally helped you shop."

"Yeah, but you're not supposed to announce it, it steals from Jeremy's thunder," Kerry scolded, leaning across her brother to glare at Jeff. But her face softened, and I could see the blush rise in her face as Jeff traced the lip of his water glass while he held her gaze for a moment too long. I caught Logan's eye across the table, and he gave me an annoyed look. I slipped my foot up between his legs, nudging against his thigh, and he reached down under the tablecloth and squeezed my toes.

_It's just flirting_, I mouthed.

His eyes rolled back into his head, and I gave him a gentle kick with my other foot.

Jeremy cleared his throat and held up his wine glass. I grabbed my glass of water and waited for everyone to follow. "So," he said, glancing down the table from me. "Today's been a sad day. But, I believe that the company of friends can make the darkest day brighter. Welcome to the infamous 'girls,' to Mary Anne's doctors, and to Kerry who abandoned twelve kids on a seven meter platform outside of Charlotte to come." Kerry winced, ducking behind her water. "Anyway," Jeremy continued, "To friends old and new, and to tomorrow. Which will be better," he promised, looking at me.

"Amen," Kerry grinned.

"Fuck yeah," Miranda agreed, tapping her wine with Dawn's. I caught Kerry's frown, but Logan grabbed her face, inflating his cheeks and then pressing his lips against Kerry's face, exhaling and making her skin squeal.

"That was funny," Jeff said, choking on his water.

"Yeah, it was," Eddie laughed, stabbing his salad. "I used to do that to Juana when we were little."

Stacey tipped her head at him, taking a piece of bread. "Is that your sister?"

"Yes," Dr. Paves smiled, her eyes dimming. Her dead sister. Logan's thumb pressed deeper into the arch of my foot, and I gave him a weak grin back. I leaned my head on Miranda's shoulder, and she kissed the top of my head.

Stacey swallowed a bite of bread and waved her hands. "Okay, so. This guy in my class asked me out? But he has total girl hair, I don't think I can deal."

"What's girl hair?" Jeff blinked. "Is that, like, long hair?"

"Oh, no," Dawn shook her head. "It's when a guy's hair is pretty. Well-coifed. Like a chick. Any layering or evidence of hair dryer action to make it styled? Total girl hair."

"And that's bad why?" Emily wondered, twirling her fork in the air. "I mean, it shows he cares about his appearance."

"Oooh, wrong answer," Miranda sighed.

Stacey let out a large breath. "It signals a battle over the bathroom. That he could out-primp me. I'm sorry, but there's only so much vanity to go around when I'm in a relationship."

"You. A relationship," Erin said, narrowing her eyes. "I thought you didn't date."

Stacey glared, "I don't date worthless men."

"They're all worthless," Miranda grumped. She sliced off a piece of the bruschetta and waved it in the air. "Show me a good guy, and I'll show you a dancing goat."

"Excuse me!" Eddie laughed, holding his hands up. "I'm feeling persecuted here."

Kerry looked startled. "I'm with Randa. For once." Jeff clucked his tongue, and she amended, "Okay, maybe some guys aren't that bad. But on the whole, most guys are sketchy."

"We try," Jeff insisted. He glanced over at Logan with a hopefully look. "Right?"

"Eating," Logan replied, keeping his head down.

"So. Girl hair," Dr. Paves prompted. "I'm taking it you shot the boy down."

Stacey made a sucking sound behind her teeth. "Eh. Trying to decide."

"Give him a whirl," Emily urged. "You can always say no to a second date. Or say that your diabetes is acting up, so you need some single time." Stacey laughed, tossing a walnut down the table. It skidded to a halt between Emily and me, but Emily picked it up and popped it in her mouth. "Mmm. Vengeful."

"How are you two planning on spending your time in the Triangle?" Dr. Paves asked, looking at Emily then over me at Miranda. "I hope lots of time at the alma matter, yes, May?"

"Yes," I nodded. "Well, this weekend, we're going to Erin's place on the ocean in Surf City. And Friday, we're seeing our friend Jessi dance here in town? But tomorrow, we're going to have a campus tour, then do some sightseeing down in Raleigh, shop a bit, and then have a nice dinner in the city, go to the tapas place that you guys recommended."

Shaking her head, Stacey mumbled, "That place isn't bad, but it's no Sundance Steak House. God almighty, I miss the Farm."

Miranda gave me a skeptical glance. "Stacey likes barnyard animals?"

"No, dear, The Farm. Stanford?" Stacey said, rolling her hands. She held her fork in front of her, the steel reflecting the yellowed light of the flames. "Maybe I could come with you? Dawn's gonna write all night, so I'm kinda, um—well, if you don't mind."

I looked over at my sister, but she was staring down at her salad, poking at a cherry tomato. "We'd love to have you, Stace."

"Yeah," Emily smiled. "You can help me get an outfit suitable for the LA clubs. I never make it past the bouncers because I can't get the clothes right—and for an underager, to get in, you gotta be slammin'. But it's like, the leather pants and the boots and the open-back shirt? So confusing to get it just right."

"May has leather pants," Jeremy blurted out.

"You do not," Kerry breathed.

Miranda clapped her hands, as Jeremy and Erin exchanged a smug look. "Oh, yes she does," Erin smirked. "Jerry and I got them for her on a dare? And she wore 'em on a date with her future husband here."

Logan's struggled to keep a smile down on his lips. "You're with me, leather," he said, tipping his chin at me.

"Chris Berman," Jeff said, his mouth dropping. "That's hella sweet."

"I've always wanted to say that!" Emily gasped. "Shut up! I'm so jealous."

I squinted at the three of them. "Will someone please translate this for me, finally? Who is this Chris person, and why was Logan so excited to say that?"

Emily patted my shoulder. "It's a sports thing."

"We love you, May, but just smile and nod—it's a bit above you, honey," Eddie winked.

I slumped down, shoving a bite of salad in my mouth. I held my hand in front of my lips and said, "When I get to Carbondale next week, I'm gonna make Kathleen and Allison explain it to me, and then you're all going to feel really bad for not explaining it to me."

"Oh, is that the Cancer Card you're playing?" Miranda giggled.

"And the Pregnancy Card," I sniffed. "I have a full deck o'pity plays right now." I sunk against the feel of a hand kneading my foot and felt myself carried on the sound of laughter, of conversation riding on the back of the smell and steam of the food. By the end of dinner, I was full, my stomach straining and my cheeks aching from smiling the whole time. When Eddie slipped me the bottle of pills, I didn't feel the blanch of blame for my decision.

I wanted more of this. Good moments. No: moments strung together to make good days. I needed good days if I was going to get out of this.

We said goodbye to Erin and Jeremy, and Miranda and Emily grabbed a pack of cigarettes, snapping the leash on J.D.'s collar. "Smoke and walk—it's the perfect combo. That, and Emmy is going to re-explain the whole drama with her editor. I guess I was too drunk to really follow," Miranda shrugged as she opened the door.

"Yeah, it's kinda sticky with the deal with the tickets and stuff," I nodded. "Just go right, towards Franklin? And then that's the main drag, just walk her up and down."

Emily grabbed a plastic trash bag from the small container next to the door. "We'll see you in a bit—we're on the pull-out couch?"

"Tonight, yeah, but tomorrow, we're kicking Logan out to Shawn's place and having us a sleepover," I beamed, bouncing from foot to foot. "Stacey and Dawn are going to make face masks and hair treatments and stuff—so girlie, our estrogen levels are going to explode."

"That sounds messy," Dr. Paves laughed. She kissed me on the cheek. "I'm off to Yelena's, and Eddie's meeting his jailbait. Call us tomorrow for lunch, okay?"

I gave her a deep hug, and then Eddie rubbed my hair before clenching me tight. "Take one before bedtime, then first thing in the morning," he mumbled.

"Thank you," I whispered, pressing my knuckles in his suit jacket.

I shut the door behind the four of them and sighed. The kitchen was full of clanking noises, of Dawn and Stacey laughing over the stereo as they did the dishes. I walked into the living room and smiled at my husband, stretched out on the couch. "Come with me," I said, waving him to follow me out into the backyard. I grabbed a pen as I opened the sliding door.

I heard a gasp from the dark corner next to the garage, next to the balsa trees behind the hammock, and I saw Jeff and Kerry spring apart. "The hell is this?" Logan snapped. "You said you weren't interested in him!"

"He's a good kisser," Kerry shrugged, stepping into the light.

"Oh, my God!' Logan whined, rocking his head back. "Katharine!"

"What, you don't want me to date?" she challenged. "You want me to, like, be like Athena and spring fully formed into a marriage?"

"Yes," he whined.

"Yeah, well, people who had sex in high school shouldn't be throwing hissy fits over a few kisses," Kerry sniffed, walking up to us and patting her brother on the shoulder. "Come on, Jeff, let's go watch a movie."

"Sorry," Jeff mumbled, trotting behind her.

Logan grabbed his arm. "I thought we were solid," he hissed.

Jeff shrugged. "When a girl says, 'Kiss me,' you don't say no. Especially when they're—um, nice," he finished with a lame bob of his head, dashing into the house and slamming the door shut.

Stomping his feet, Logan made his way to the hammock, flopping down on his stomach. "Kerry's kissing, Hunter's got crushes on girls—and probably kissing? I can't take this."

"When you were Kerry's age, you had lost your virginity," I reminded him.

"So what," he retorted. "When I was, what, two years older than my brother, I was having dirty thoughts about girls. These are not things to be proud of."

"At thirteen, huh?" I said, sitting down next to him. "Girls, plural?"

"Okay, just one girl," he grinned, turning on his side. His arm snaked around my waist.

"Yeah, well, I was thinking about one boy," I smiled. "And who knew he would get to be this hot."

"I wasn't hot back then?" he scoffed.

I laughed, tipping my head against his. "Oh, angel, you were always irresistible. But now, you're dead gorgeous—and all of the girls at your school agree. And probably some of the guys. I'm glad you said no to that calendar, it would have provided one too many fantasies, and I hate sharing you." I traced the line of his nose, the small bump where he had broken it a few months ago. "So. In eighth grade. You thought about me at night, huh."

"Night, day, whenever I was alone in my room," he admitted, his hand traveling down my leg. "Damn, this dress destroys me. First time I saw you walk down the stairs in it, I had to remind myself that we weren't in private."

"Oh, but I knew how you thought," I teased. "Anyone who caught a glimpse of your pants knew how you felt."

"Way to keep it classy," he laughed, tickling behind my knee. "You seem really happy right now—I've missed this."

"I had a really good night," I sighed, slipping down next to him. "And Eddie's putting me back on meds. There's a risk of miscarriage, but…I need this, angel, or else I don't think I can make it through." I took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. "We need to talk. I have some things I need to tell you, that I've been scared to tell you."

He bit his lip. "About the cancer? The baby?"

"No, no, just—stuff that's been worrying me. And I had another dream. So we need to talk. Keep the lines of communication open," I echoed. I took his left hand and spread it open. I sat up, putting that palm-up in my lap, and uncapped my pen. I drew two stick figures—one with a triangle of a skirt with a curly mop of hair, the other much taller than the first with glasses. Above them, I drew seven little stars in the shape of the Big Dipper; between the figures and the stars, I put in a line with arrows on each end, pointing at both the people and the constellation.

I blew on his skin for a moment to let it dry, and I kissed the drawing. I let him look at it for a minute before pressing my hand against his.

"Guess how much I love you," I murmured.

"To the stars and back," he whispered. He pulled me against him, and the heat of his body seeped under my bones, baking me into energy. I put my fingers on his cheekbones and kissed him, my lips dissolving against his, tongue sparking at the feel of his mouth.

"We're going to get through anything," I promised.

He sucked on my lower lip and let it go, kissing my chin. "Damn right," he agreed. He swallowed. "You were right. To name him Richard." For a moment, he was silent. "I wonder who he would have looked like."

I closed my eyes, seeing my baby, so perfect in my arms. "He was us," I answered, pulling Logan back to me. "He was just us. And that's enough." His hand found my belly, tapping against the bulging flesh, and I thought—_let that be enough for you, too_.

_Stay._ _Please_.


	18. Chapter 16

I rubbed my eyes and shifted straighter, the couch cushions slumping against my body. J.D. opened her mouth and snapped her teeth—I wondered what she was dreaming about. I stroked her long belly and shut my book around my finger so I could stretch. My back popped a little, and I twisted back and forth. Popping a strip of raw pepper in my mouth, I placed the book back up on the back of the couch and started to read again.

The swing of headlights into the window startled me. I craned my neck, watching the car pull into the driveway and idle there. Logan? No, he was at Shawn's. Everyone else was home by now.

Except for Dawn. But she had walked to the coffee shop to write. Unless that's not where she had gone tonight.

Two shadowed people got out of the car and walked to the door, hands laced together. I followed them until they disappeared behind the Union Jack flag, the sounds of laughter, of insistent voices, of kissing floating from behind the red, blue, and white striped nylon. Nudging J.D. out of my lap, I stood up and went to the door, snapping on the outside light and yanking open the door.

"This is the second time in two days I've busted up clandestine kissing," I sighed, opening up the screen door.

Dawn and Henry Collins jerked apart, Dawn slapped her hand over her mouth, and Henry blushed so red that the freckles on his face connected into a sold red splotch.

"I thought you two were over," I murmured, resting back against the door.

Dawn's face creased with a gray pallor of misery and guilt and want. "He called…and I missed him," she sighed, taking his hand. She waved her finger in his face. "You were supposed to be a summer fling, damn you!"

"Can't have a fling without sex—you're kinda left with a relationship," he teased, his finger tickling over her wrist. He put his hand on the left side of her face, cradling her cheek and pulling her in for a kiss. "Call me, okay, O.C.? And enjoy the book."

"See ya, Brentwood," she whispered, pulling him back for another kiss, her arms holding him tight around his chest. When he walked away, he ducked his head against his chest, giving him a loping boyish look, as if he was seventeen, not a decade older.

Dawn bit down on her lips and tossed herself into my arms. "What do I do, May?" she cried, banging her head on my shoulder. "I really like him."

I rubbed her back. "Oh, sis." I bit my lip for a moment and then squeezed her again. "Hold on, let me get J.D. We'll take her on a walk and talk this out, okay?"

She nodded, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms, as I went into the house and put J.D. on her leash. She leapt around in crazed arcs, and I shushed her, checking up the stairs to make sure no one heard. My eyes went towards the kitchen, where the basement door was. Where Stacey lay below.

As we reached the street, Dawn sniffed, pulling up the hem of her magenta shirt and passing it over her eyes. "What are you doing up right now? Where are Emmy and Randa?"

"Emmy and Randa are dead drunk on my bed—they hit the bottle of schnapps like the fate of the nation depended on it—they played a drinking game to _Pride & Prejudice_? Whenever you scream at Liz and Mr. Darcy to just kiss already, drink one. Whenever you lust after Mr. Darcy, drink two. Whenever you say 'aww,' drink three. Whenever you hate Keira Knightley—for being too pretty, for getting to kiss Mr. Darcy, whatever, you don't need a reason, honestly—finish your drink," I explained with a giggle.

"They were hammered within thirty minutes," Dawn laughed.

"Oh, yeah," I nodded. "Randa tried to wash off her face mask while trashed and knocked Stacey right in the nose. It was like Marcia Brady and the football—possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen."

Dawn jerked J.D. away from a tree. "Poor Stacey! Now she'll never be a teen model."

I grinned. "So, yeah, they're both drunk, but—truth is, I don't sleep that well without Logan. I'm too used to him, he's like having an electric blanket wrapped around my body. Sometimes? He puts his leg over my hips, and I just feel really safe." I blushed, touching my face with the back of my hand. "I didn't sleep at all last Friday until he climbed into the hospital bed with me."

She looked down at the sidewalk, letting out a low line of air through her nose. "Yeah. When I've slept over, Henry puts his head on my chest and wraps his arms around me. He's all soft and stuff, like a teddy bear. I thought at first he was doing that because he was all, Wow, boobies, but I think he's listening to the sound of my heart." Dawn chewed on her top lip, her teeth sliding back as she smiled. "Isn't that sweet?"

"He's very nice," I said. "You're taller than he is."

"By at least three inches. Good thing I live in flip flops," she snorted. Clucking her tongue at the dog, she urged J.D. to follow us onto the main road. The dog chased a candy bar wrapper down the block, tugging Dawn ahead of me. I caught up to them a few minutes later, and Dawn started flapping her arms. J.D. stopped, cocking her head up at my sister, as Dawn laughed, "Dude, he's like a little fucking kid! He's the fucking boy in the bubble, May! He's had one girlfriend, and that was in grad school, and she sounds like Janine Kishi, right, so he's never had any fun in his life."

"And you are a hot fun injection," I giggled, knocking my hip against hers.

Her cheeks reddened. "Ending things with him…I missed him. He totally challenges me, you know? Like, no one likes to talk politics or society with me, but he will. And unlike Kristy, who shared a lot of my beliefs? He doesn't, and when he fights me, it helps me clarify my own ideas. Like, we were debating whether or not a tuition payment plan like Georgia's should be instituted in each state, and what the role of the Department of Education should be, and it was like, I haven't _thought_ about this kinda stuff, right, and it's blowing my mind!" She ran her hands through her hair. "He's so conservative, it's a little wrong, but he's open minded enough to talk anything through. And he's so curious—always wants to keep learning. I'm so excited to see him—to talk to him. Most guys, I just want to screw and, well," she saluted, "see ya, dude."

We walked in silence for a few blocks, the sound of bars and clubs from the strip bouncing on the street. I led us left onto a green space in the campus, letting J.D. off of her lead so she could run around. "Will she come back?"

"Dawnie, Logan's got her so well trained, she'll whistle Dixie. J.D.! Jaydee, Jaydee, front!" I called, drumming my hands against my thighs. J.D. paused in front of a tree where squirrels were rumbling around up in the lush, leaf-covered limbs, and bolted back to my arms. "Good girl—go run," I told her, pointing back out into the yard.

I eased myself to the ground. Today, while we shopped, Miranda looked at my belly and gasped, _Dude, you look pregnant_. I had abandoned my jeans a week before, using Dawn's pants—something she called depressing and demoralizing. At what point would strangers start asking me when I was due? Asking if they could lay their hands on me to feel the baby—and would I let them? When would I stop worrying?

Running my fingers over my abdomen like a whirling hypnotist's circle, I asked, "Dawn, can you tell me why Stacey would get so upset?"

Dawn blinked, her eyes tossing me a challenge. "Why does Logan play basketball?"

I tipped my head back. I let out a hiss of breath and shook my head, my mouth bitter with a smile. "He made me promise, sis. And, you know? That isn't a fair trade because why he does what he does isn't hurting anyone. You, on the other hand, are in pain, and it's tied to this bullshit with Stace. Unless it's not bullshit, Unless she's hurting again." I grabbed my sister's arm as my breath stuffed in my throat. "Was she raped again—by a professor or something? What happened to her, oh, my God, Dawn, please, tell me."

Rubbing my shoulder, Dawn rushed, "Calm down, May—you're supposed to be taking it easy." She chewed on her lip, glancing around the yard. I saw her head bobble as she followed J.D.'s circuit between the squirrel-filled trees. Dawn sighed, pulling her legs up to her chest. "She wasn't raped, no. But—something bad happened. And it's just reset the whole clock on her, you know, after all of that time and all of that therapy, she just got the wind knocked out of her, and she's been working so hard, and then I go and have to fall for the one person I shouldn't."

I watched Dawn wipe at her eyes and mustered the courage to ask, "Was it Henry? That did something bad?"

"Oh, no," Dawn hurried. She shook her head so hard that her hair escape the clips that swept it back from her face. "It's not him, it's the principle of the matter. He's a professor: that's enough."

I folded my hands in my lap and waited. Dawn's eyes edged back and forth, finally settling on the green space between us. "Whatever I tell you, you're going to tell Logan."

"Probably," I shrugged. "He's not my boyfriend, Dawnie, he's my husband. For us to work, we have to be really honest with each other. And to be real, he's worried about Stacey, too. She had such a flip out over you dating Henry—and…maybe this is us being self-centered, but he was getting so annoyed over all of the fighting, he was thinking of kicking all of you out, because he didn't want you guys stressing me out, especially because I was so low. If there is a good reason for why there _was_ a fight, I can tell him, and he'll be more patient if…"

"If she finds out again and shits herself," Dawn mumbled, ripping at the grass. "Part of me has been nervous that, like, if it came to a point that we couldn't live together? He'd side with Stacey, and you'd side with me. I'm not wrong, am I?"

"He still thinks you hate him," I admitted. "It's kinda funny—he's gotten pretty tight with Jeff and feels like you're nice to him because you have to be. And for me, it's the opposite. You and me are close, Jeff is cool with me because Sharon says he has to be."

Her mouth flickered up in a wry grin. "Yeah, well, we gotta work on that. Jeff was totally real with you when he said that he's put all of your issues aside—and Logan's my brother now, I guess. I gotta get tighter with him. He still kinda bugs me—you know me, I'm always going to tell you what I think. With him, he just seems to be too nervous to function unless he's playing or if you're not around to tell him it's okay."

"Maybe he's nervous because he doesn't feel comfortable," I pointed out, grabbing my own fingerfull of grass from the lawn. "It's hard to feel relaxed with someone who you know isn't your biggest fan." I shrugged—the spirit of honesty, right? "I mean, sis, sometimes I get this vibe that you still resent the fact that Logan kinda came out of nowhere to be my big support system during the first go-round with cancer. And I suppose there's still a part of me that resents that your friendship with Stacey literally blossomed overnight and left no room for me. I wonder if that's why Stacey and I never can be, like, as tight as I think we could be."

Dawn rubbed my leg. "Psych Girl," she teased, pinching a bit of skin on my knee.

"I will also accept Dr. Psych Girl, but whichever," I grinned. My smile wilted, and I put my hand on top of hers. "Please, Dawn."

The sound of her breathing grew heavy, and she whistled for J.D. After the puppy bounded to us, she gathered J.D. in her arms and began stroking the dog's short hair from head to tail. "Something bad did happen with a professor. This fall semester, Stacey took the last of her foreign language requirements—a French lit class. And I swear, within seconds of her coming out of her first class, girl called my ass saying, 'I'm in luv.' With the prof."

"Oh, boy," I sighed, crossing my legs. "Stacey and older men strikes again. Hell—Stacey and her crushing on _teachers _strikes again."

"Right? But this wasn't, like, the thing with the Sea City lifeguard or even Mr. What'shisname from SMS. This was someone ancient—like, forty. But I saw him," Dawn added in a jumble. "He doesn't look forty-three. He looked, like, Eddie's age. But he was totally grown up, right, totally suave and sophisticated and cool."

I blanched. _Sophisticated_. Stacey's favorite word. "I bet he lived in Paris."

"Uh, can I take, 'Taught at the Sorbonne' for five hundred, Alex?" Dawn snorted. "When I saw him at the Steak House, he was the total French cliché—suit slacks and jacket with a white shirt unbuttoned just so, _oui_, with a silk scarf—and smoking a cigarette, and his face had stubble—it was like, _Fuuuck_, Stacey's creaming, you know?"

I frowned. "The Steak House? Didn't Stacey mention that at dinner?"

"Oh, yeah, it's totally swank—it's near the Farm—Stanford," Dawn explained, rolling her eyes at my confused look. "He took her there for their third date, and she called me to peek at him and give me my impression—I was, like, hiding behind a fucking ficus tree to get a good look, but yeah, the man fell out of an American's Parisian wet dream. Totally hot. Little teeny bits of silver in his hair…yeah, your basic nightmare," Dawn sighed, her eyes frosting over a bit in lust.

"Wait," I said, holding up my hand. "Date? Dawn, she went out on a _date_? What would a forty year old guy want with someone Stacey's age?"

Dawn stared at me until I mentally slapped the back of my own head.

Duh, Mary Anne.

"But I thought Stacey said she hasn't slept with anyone since going to Stanford—the ten date rule and all," I protested, bracing my hands on my ankles and leaning forward.

"She hasn't," Dawn sighed. She tucked the flyaway bits of her hair back and waved her hands in front of her body. "Let me back up. Stacey calls me after the first class, says Professor Hesford is so hot, he was awarded _hott_ status, but then he burned off the second T, totally. And I'm all, well, that's nice, but he's your prof, right? And she's getting all Stacey over it—you know, I can get any guy I want, blah blah, he seems so sophisticated, and then she hits the kicker, and her voice got so soft, my heart just cried."

_"Besides. He's older—he'll know how to treat a girl without hurting her," Stacey whispered. _

_"Stace," Dawn sighed, pressing her hand over her chest. "I guess, maybe… Or maybe he knows how to hurt someone and get away with it. Just—keep this as a crush, okay? Besides, I bet you're not allowed to date a prof anyway." Thank God. That'll stow it. _

_As if anything could stop Stacey. It was what Dawn loved about her—and what made Dawn so scared. Stacey never understood no. Stacey always got her way, no matter how hard she had to push or pull or twist the truth to get it._

_Which sometimes had its advantages. But not this time. Dawn's body grew cold, and she had an image of Stacey balled up on the floor, crying. The way she had done before. Eye-aching, body-numbing cries. All because of a boy._

_Not again, Dawn prayed, crossing her fingers as Stacey gushed on and on. Not again._

"Well, anyway, Stacey naturally goes to his office hours the first week, to introduce herself. Stacey almost is as bad as you in the brown-noser department, and she does that every term during the first week," Dawn rolled her eyes.

"Hey, I do that do," I bristled. "It helps develop a rapport, shut up."

Dawn blinked. "Wow. Nerd. Well, Stacey does it to establish the fact that she might be hot, but she's smart—well, at least in math. In the other classes, she really is trying to build sympathy for the point in the term where she just decides that English and stuff is for chumps and just give her the discreet mathematics or whatever. Anyway, she meets him, he talks about Paris for an hour, and Stacey's so hot and bothered, she got high, goes on out to The Dutch Goose, and makes out with some random guy so she can pretend it's Professor Frenchy giving her a little lesson on how his people kiss."

I clenched my teeth together and blew out a gust of air. "Oh, Stacey."

"She was in _luv_," Dawn cooed, batting her eyes. "And then, and then! On her first essay, dude man writes, 'Come see me in office hours' instead of a grade. So, she goes, and he says that she got an A on the paper, but for her to _get_ that A, she has to come out on a date with him."

_"Please say yes," he said, his mouth arcing in a smooth smile, a hand reaching across the table to touch the back of her wrist. "Or else I'll be devastated—and you'll _be_ something else," _B.

_Stacey grinned at his pun—how cute! "Well, Professor, I am nothing if not a dedicated student." She pulled her hands back, putting them on the bottom of the chair, her arms squeezing against her hips as she crossed her legs and leaned back. "Should I consider this extra tutoring?"_

_He tipped his head back as he laughed, and the large photograph of the River Seine flashed in the low light of the room. May had a picture like that in her room, but it was a copy of a photograph that her friend Allison had taken. Stacey's eyes hardened a bit as she thought of Allison, how she had hurt Stacey so many years ago—but that was in the past. It was over, Stacey had let that go. _

_This was a new Stacey, this Stanford Stacey. Thousands of miles from anyone who knew her as a cold girl. This Stacey had cried out the rape, had beat her out of her body to try to get back to the Anastacia that shined inside. This Stacey had tons of friends, was never alone on a weekend, this Stacey was thriving._

_This Stacey hadn't been in love in years. She had been too scared. No—she had been waiting—she had been waiting for a man like this. A _man_. Yes. A real French man, his accent flattened by so many years in the States, but the way that he tipped vowels up and down in his mouth, the way he swallowed consonants…he could say anything, and she would find it hot. _

_A man would know what to do with her heart, her poor rebuilt, lonely heart. Davis wanted to love her, but he was so far away. In _Milwaukee_. You can't make a love work if it's stretched between here and there. No: this man, this _man_, he would be right._

_He would not disappoint her, not like all the rest. This man._

"Stacey called me and was all, it's not _luv_—it's _love_, and on and on, and I'm like, it's your first date. Keep your crotch on, you know? And she said, Don't worry, I'm not abandoning the ten date rule, and I was, like, dates? Professor, hello?" Dawn's forehead knotted. "Teacher and students and sex are such a bad idea." And I saw Vista flash across her eyes.

I held tight to Dawn's hands. "So, they started dating."

"Yeah, like a date a week. And it was getting so fucking obnoxious, you know, just call after call all about him. They even came into San Fran, where he lives and stuff, but she didn't bother to come by, she was just so crazy about him, blah blah. No sex, but he didn't start pushing her until after the third date. Fourth date, she had her period. And then the next two weeks, he seemed upset? But Stacey was high on date six and decided to give him a hummer, so that was okay, but…" Dawn scratched her neck. "It…just blew up."

Date seven.

A date in the city, at a sushi bar with large plasma TVs playing out the first week of the NCAA basketball season, blasting it up on the TV.

_Stacey smirked to herself. Totally easy way to impress a guy. She leaned over to the bartender and asked, "Do you know if the Marquette game is on TV?" He shook his head, and she drummed her fingers on the slick wood surface, grabbing a toothpick and poking her fingers. Like a needle. She knew that feel. "Can you put on the North Carolina game?"_

_He grinned, switching the channel over, and the screen filled with boys running back and forth in white jerseys against a team in red. She was ready, ready to point to the screen and brag, _So, I know that white guy._ Every man she had ever met was so awed by that. Fred would melt down at her feet._

_Maybe that would make him stop pushing her. Maybe. _

_"Wait—why is Logan on the bench?" Stacey gasped, narrowing her eyes at her friend who was glaring at the action on the court as he sat in a suit, his right arm in a sling. "Hold on," she said, pressing her hand on Fred's thigh. She pulled out her cell and searched her address book for a number that she hadn't called in a while._

"She called me that night," I breathed. "She asked why Logan was sitting. And I said that he had torn his rotator cuff a couple days before. And she said—"

_"Well, as long as he's okay…that's too bad, though. I was hoping to impress everybody with my great knowledge of his playing," she pouted._

_"That's right," May snorted. "Logan plays just so that you can score points in a bar—is it a guy, Stace? You trying to woo some guy with your basketball knowledge?"_

_"I don't have to," she giggled. "I'm past that. Anyway, give your angel a hug for me, tell him I'll email him in the morning." The morning. Because this date would be wonderful and take all night._

_But not like that. It was only date seven. Not yet, not yet._

"But that was the night his patience wore out," Dawn murmured, scratching J.D. hard behind the ears. "He took her back to his apartment again, and they made out, and then he started sliding his hand up her skirt, and she was all, Not so much, and he just exploded on her, May. Said he had put in all this time and money in her, when did he get anything back?"

_"Don't you want to spend time with me?" Stacey trembled, sitting up and pulling her skirt as hard as she could over her thighs. Too much leg—there was too much leg for him to see. Why did she have to wear this skirt! _

_"This isn't high school, Stacey," he snarled. "I'm not going to give you my letter jacket, and then we make love at prom. I thought you said you were looking for a grown up relationship."_

_Her eyes filled with tears—what a baby, she snapped inside of herself. Just like May used to be, all crying and soft. Stop it—_stop it. _Get in control. "Grown up doesn't mean sex," she declared, jutting her chin up in the air. Maybe, tipping her head back like this, she could make the tears roll back inside of her head._

_A disgusted sigh eked out of his mouth. "Maybe on the Disney Channel, but not with me. I thought I made myself clear about what I wanted. It was you who didn't."_

_"I said I wanted to wait," Stacey yelled._

_"It's been long enough," he shouted back, touching her thigh. It was a light touch, but it burned through her skin and slapped right at that place. That memory. Of him._

_Stacey's hand whipped into her purse, and her fingers found it, the cylinder full of pepper spray. That she had carried every day since that night. Since her lost hour._

_She never got her hour back, did she. That hour, that hour at the clinic. The hour she could never remember, the hour that she did, staring at the clock, so sure she had AIDS. That she was dead. That he had killed her when he forced her. No—not forced her. _

_She never had the chance to fight back._

_"Get your hands off of me," Stacey hissed, pointing the canister at him. "I swear, I will burn out your eyes."_

_"You're insane!" he screamed, jumping off the bed. "You're positively insane!"_

_"No man touches me without my permission," Stacey said, her voice flat and calm, still pointing the canister at him. _

_Fred tossed his head back and forth. "Oh, I assure you, Stacey—all of my hopes of sex do not hang on a little girl from Connecticut. Within an hour, I can fill this bed with one of twenty women." And he hit that word so hard, Stacey's heart shook. A woman for a man. Not her, this little girl clutching at the only weapon she had._

_He pointed at the door. "Get out."_

_She backed out of the room, watching him the whole time. When she got into the hallway, she broke into a run, running as fast as she could in her high heels—the spike of the left shoe snapped when she hit the sidewalk, and she reached down and ruined the right heel, too. So she could be balanced when she ran. Broken on both sides._

_She slumped into a BART station and dialed Dawn. "Hey, Sunshine?" Stacey whispered, trying to keep her voice light and honey-feeling. "Can you come get me?"_

_But Dawn knew. She knew. "Where are you," she demanded, Dawn's voice a thing of steel._

_"I don't know," Stacey sobbed, putting her head in her lap. "I don't know who I am anymore."_

_"Stace," Dawn said quietly. "I said _where._ Not who."_

"She stayed over with me that night—actually, she skipped all of her classes on Friday and just hung out in the city. We had a good time, and when she left on Sunday, I thought we had come up with a good plan: basically, a dating version of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. She wouldn't ask him for anything again, so he couldn't tell her anything hurtful. She'd just do the work and be done with him in a few weeks," Dawn said, shrugging her shoulders.

I raised my eyebrows. "I assume that didn't work, though."

"Oh, hell, no," Dawn spat. "On every paper, Stacey got a C. He was criticizing her grammar to such an anal degree, it was insane. Like, she gave her papers to a dorm mate of hers who was like, Fuck, this is some harsh grading for a low level class. And so Stacey paid that girl fifty bucks to write a paper for her? And the paper got a C—and he just ripped apart her lit analysis, _and_ it had a note that basically said, 'I know this isn't your work.' So Stacey just gave him something that he could not only fail her on the spot with, but get her, like, suspended."

My hands flew over my mouth. "Oh, my God!"

"Yeah, so she was trapped. And so she got a C in the class, and she emailed her old advisor Dr. Collins and pretty much cried to him that she had ruined any chance of getting into a Harvard or the London School, and he said, Stace, relax, you have such a brilliant math mind, one C in stupid French means nothing in the long run." Dawn twisted her hands together, and her eyes began to glisten with tears. "And then he invited her to take his summer grad seminar—said that he knew she could ace it, that an A from Duke would make that C look like the aberraton—no, oh, fuck it, the _mistake_ that it was."

I took a breath, trying to sort everything in my head. "Is that why she got upset—because she took that email and fell in luv again?"

"No—because—think about it, May. I'm dating her prof. What if we break up? What's to say that he wouldn't take it out on Stacey?" Dawn said, drooping down, making her tall frame look reduced into a little girl's body. "I mean, he's so nice, of course he wouldn't, but you can understand why she'd be terrified. This is her chance to really erase that C, this is a professor she trusts—it could all get ruined. Because of me," she said, her lower lip pushing out.

"And I bet the secrecy doesn't help," I added in a quiet voice. "Since her relationship was a secret, and that blew up on her."

"Probably—but she doesn't want me to be with him, and I want to be—I have to be," Dawn said, gasping for a breath. "I mean—May, how do you know you're in love? I've never been in love. How do you know?"

I chewed on my lip, lying down on my side. I stared up at the maze of leaves on the poplar trees above me and tried to sort through all of the layers of my heart, to go back to the first moment I knew I loved Logan. That first moment—the night they discovered the tumors in my breasts, the night that I knew it was real, the cancer, the night he inked me over in stars.

"I didn't know I loved him at first," I heard myself say, looking past the leaves to see the tiny white dots of constellations above. "I just remember feeling like I had found a part of myself that I didn't know existed—this image of me that he could see, and I was just stunned that the Mary Anne in his eyes was this amazing girl, this beautiful girl, who had a map of herself already. No one could take her away. And he was the one who found her for me, inside of me." I licked my lips, feeling the smile shape of them. "The next day, we were all on the same flight out, and Sharon and I were together, and he was ten rows back, and I couldn't stop turning around to stare at him. I didn't want to let him out of my sight. And he was doing his homework, that jerk!"

"Lee? Homework? Never," Dawn laughed, lying down next to me.

I stuck my tongue out at her. "Well, when the seatbelt light went off, Sharon said that we were ridiculous, and she changed seats with him—and he was all oblivious to how I had been looking at him, the nerd. And he put his arm around me, and I rested my head on his heart, and I remember thinking, This sound, the sound of his pulse—I think this is my favorite sound in the whole world. The funny thing is, I didn't think _I love him_. Not then, not when he had that accident the next day—but, it was like, every time my heart was beating, I could almost hear his heart, too. I guess that's love. When someone gets so far inside of you that you can graft your heart with theirs."

Dawn rolled onto her stomach. "I think I love him, maybe. He's the first thing I think about in the morning. When writing about Vista gets me really depressed, I can call him, and he cheers me up in minutes, just talking about his day or something cool he read." Her face curled over in wickedness as she added, "He's what I think about when I use my vibrator."

"You have a vibrator in my house!" I squawked. "Dawnie!"

"Come on, I'm not getting any—I'm trying to teach him how to go down on a girl, but he's…taking a lot of work," Dawn grumped, shaking her head.

I bit hard on my lip. "Weeelll…Davis had told Logan, what you do is trace the alphabet." My face exploded with heat as I stared up at the trees. Not at her. "You go through all the letters once, maybe twice, then repeat the letters that got the big reactions, figure out her favorite, and when you think she can't take it anymore, just do the best letter over and over. Until the end."

Dawn grabbed my face so she could look at my eyes for a moment before bursting into a screech of laughter. "That's possibly? The funniest shit I have ever heard in my life, ever!" She pounded her fists on the ground, and J.D. went skittering away from her in fright. "Oh, my God, that's fantastic. It's a brilliant technique, by the way, but that's—oh, that's great. Oh, I am so buying Alphabits cereal and taunting his ass now."

"Sis!" I yelled, shoving her.

After wiping her eyes and slowing her breath, Dawn scooted back up, tugging me to face her. "Okay. Hottest sex ever. I'll go first—remember that guy from the campaign—Zack? Well. We went to his apartment, and I had on this La Pearla lingerie, okay, all black lace and stuff. Which reminds me—where did you get the satin panties with the buttons on the ass?"

"Urban Outfitters," I shrugged. "Those are total special occasion knickers."

"Note to self," Dawn muttered, tapping her chin. "Okay," she boomed, waving her hands. "Okay, okay. So. He's all, I'm in charge of the Obama campaign, blah blah, Mr. Powerful and all. And so I thought it would be nice to turn the table on him, right? So, I handcuffed him to his bed."

"You did not," I gasped, leaning forward. "He _liked_ it?"

"He went insane," Dawn gushed, bouncing her knees. "He was totally my bitch, and I had my way with his power-tripping ass all night. Best night of my life. Of course, he was a bit of a douche, but whatever. We had so much fun, it should have been illegal. Probably was, in Alabama," she giggled, wiggling her body. "Your turn!"

I took in a long breath and hissed it out of my nose. "Well. I never go to Logan's games. I've been to the ones where he plays at Duke, of course, and his first home game after the injury, but that's it. But, I wanted to let him know that I support him—that I'm his biggest fan, right?" I shut my eyes and drummed my fingers against my cheekbones. "Um. So. Jeremy and I went thrifting, and I found this old UNC cheerleader's uniform—"

"Oh, Holy Fantasy, Batman!" Dawn howled. "You dressed up like a cheerleader!"

"I did!" I squealed. "We had seen _A History of Violence_, like, two weeks before? Which, it was a little scary—okay, a lot scary, but the movie was so smart? It was such a smart movie that I was glad I saw it—and Viggo Mortenson is so fine," I breathed. "Anyway, there's this scene where the wife wears a cheerleading outfit, and it was so hot, it was just incendiary, and he told me that turned him on, so…yeah. And I got old fashioned fluffy pom poms and everything." I lowered my voice and glanced around. "He pulled my panties off with his teeth, he was so excited."

"Mary Anne B. Spier, that B now stands for 'Beyond Sexy,' bravo!" Dawn said, giving me a high five. "I hope he fulfills one of your fantasies now."

"The beach scene from _From Here to Eternity_, that's mine. One day," I sighed, clasping my hands over my heart. "He says he knows a little beach in Italy, near his uncle's place, so, I just gotta get to Positano."

"You just gotta get better, " Dawn said, tucking a curl of my hair back.

"That's the plan," I said, as light as my voice would allow.

Dawn opened her mouth and then swallowed. "I'm thinking…maybe I should stay here. Until the baby is born. I mean, who knows how long you'll be in cancer treatment, maybe even until school starts, and Mom and I were thinking that maybe you'd need some help."

I gave her a long look before carefully shaping my sentence. "Would Henry be a factor in your decision?"

My sister glanced at her hands. "He'd make moving here a whole lot easier, but let's be real, May. I make friends really easy, and if I don't, who cares. I am who I am, and either you're cool with that or not. That's why God invented cable TV—so that you have something to fall back on." She looked up at me, her navy eyes catching the streetlamp, a snowing a white across the blue. "I'm serious—if everything goes well, your last two months overlap Logan beginning his season, and your friends are great and all, but they'll have class—Mom and I really want someone who's just here for you. And this writing shit is harder than I thought. I mean, I'm not gonna be done by the end of the summer. Taking time off for my book isn't that bad of an idea."

Dawn tossed back her head and let out a snorting laugh. "Dude, Jeff told me that he'd love to stay. Though I think that's mostly to avoid Carol and Dad."

"That's a mess," I sighed. "He shouldn't have to deal with it alone."

"Well, what can you do? I told him, just stay out of the house as much as possible," she shrugged. "He can't tell Mom, she'll yank his ass back east so quick, he won't have time to even stand up straight. But, he's gotta concentrate on finishing school, having a real good senior season. Have fun and stuff. You need someone who's just all about you."

"I'll think about it," I said, squeezing her hands. I froze, though. "Um, you'd have your own place, right?"

"Oh, hell yes," Dawn said, too fast. "No offense, but I need my own space, for sure." She blinked, and her face began to light up, first in her eyes, then the curl of her mouth. Kristy's face. The idea face. "May—you had a great night with your girls, right?"

"So great," I grinned.

Her head was bobbing. "And…you say you don't sleep as well without Logan, right?"

"Right," I said, narrowing my eyes at her. "What are you getting at?"

Dawn bolted to her feet. "Let's just go get him. Let the girls sleep off the pride and prejudice of alcohol, you two can have the pull out couch. I mean, you have had one shitty, shitty week—I don't think it's a sin to say, I miss my fucking husband, I want to snuggle."

I peered up at her. "Really?"

"Is he within walking distance of here?" Dawn asked, turning around in a circle.

Nodding, I pointed back towards our house. She grinned, offering me her hand. I whistled for J.D., and after snapping the leash back on her collar, we left the yard in a heap of excited giggles as Dawn cooked up elaborate schemes of scaling the walls of Keshawn's apartment complex to retrieve Logan.

"There's no trellis," Dawn moaned, staring up at the third floor window.

"I guess you'll just have to fly on up there. C'mon, Supergirl, up, up, and away!" I laughed, raising my fists above my head.

Dawn picked up a handful of gravel and began chucking it at the window; the rocks plinked against the glass, making a sharp crackling noise that sent shivers up my legs and back. I already felt cold—I tugged my sweatshirt down over my body as I grabbed a small pebble and hurled it up at the window, striking the plastic pane.

A moment later, the curtains jerked apart, and the window slid up. Logan's face appeared behind the screen, a ghostly blot of skin. "How come I knew Dawn was behind this?" he said in a loud whisper, and I could feel him rolling his eyes.

"It could have been Randa," Dawn hissed. "Your woman can't sleep without you."

"I couldn't sleep, either," he admitted. "But I didn't want to interrupt the hair braiding or whatever it is that you girls do."

I clucked my tongue. "Mock all you want, you totally wanted in."

"I know, I love it when y'all French braid my hair—and I was really looking forward to the manicures," he sighed. "I just have the worst cuticles, I swear."

Dawn laughed. "Get your ass down here and come home with us."

"No—Mary Anne, you c'mere. I have the air mattress all made up and stuff. It's really comfy," he sang, waggling his fingers.

I kissed Dawn on the cheek. "I'll see you in the morning—I have radiation at nine, so I'll be back real early," I smiled. "Thank you so much."

"No, thank you—it was nice to get some stuff off my chest." She rubbed her hands through my curls. "Sleep well, sis."

"I will," I promised. I knew. I waited for the buzz of the door unlocking and slipped into the building and up to Keshawn's door. He yanked it open before my knuckles could brush against the wood. I barreled into his chest, and he curled his head down on my shoulder.

He kissed my neck. "We gotta make it through a whole weekend apart, pretty girl. Think we can?"

"You can snuggle with Jeff, I'll take Emily," I grinned into his skin. "If she wasn't doing the whole drunk snoring thing, I wouldn't have gotten out of bed. She's a good cuddler."

"Is she?" he laughed. "See, I can speak from personal experience that Miranda is not. She's too restless, can't stay in one spot. Flip and flop and kick, kick, kick." He pulled back a bit and touched my stomach. "No kicking yet?"

"None," I sighed. "Soon, though. I hope. Its fourteen weeks tomorrow, that's about when it should start. But you won't be able to feel it for a while."

He stuck out his lower lip, and I giggled, wrapping my arms around his waist. Logan let out a breath. "Can I say something without sounding really, like, hard up?"

"That it's been way over a week since we last had sex? Yeah, I realized that, too. Dawn and I were kinda swapping some stories. I told her about the cheerleader thing," I admitted.

"You said you would keep that quiet," he groaned. "Great—now she'll be putting in, like, _Bring It On_ and taunting me. I can feel it, I can." I watched a ring of red blush up his neck, and I touched my cold fingers to his skin. His flesh pulled up in small bumps, and he smiled at me. "That was one freakin' amazing night, though."

We walked into the dark apartment as I whispered, "I know. But—and I'm gonna say something, and it's cheesy, so be warned—every night with you is amazing, angel."

"You're just hoping to get some now," he teased, crawling onto the air mattress. I curled up against him, nudging his left leg over the rise of my hips, belting me back against his warm body. He bent his head back over my shoulder and asked, "How was your day?"

"Oh, good—I love having the girls here. They make everything so much funnier." I paused. "Angel, you need to do your Barbara letter before you go."

"I wrote it last week—on Friday," Logan said. He stopped for a moment and dug his lips against my throat. "I didn't know who else to talk to? So I wrote to her."

"What did you say?" I whispered. He was quiet, so I turned around and touched his face. "Logan, tell me. What did you say to her?"

He traced the slope of my nose. "The letters are private, Mary Anne."

My face bombed up in red, and I pressed my hands against my cheeks. He was right, of course he was. "I'm sorry," I mumbled, nodding my head over and over. "You're totally right, I'm sorry. So, how was your day?"

The silence tightened between us like a rope. Logan leaned forward and kissed me, his hands sliding up under my sweatshirt and slipping it off of my body. Now we were both bare-chested, his tanned skin dwarfing my pale line. His fingers worked into my scars, his fingers moving deep, his fingers so close to where the cancer lives.

Where it dies.

The pressure of his touch rolled me onto my back, and he sat on my hips and kept coursing over my network of damage, pushing out the pain. Trying to make it whole. After a while, he moved from my chest to my shoulders, then down to my hands. Then into my legs, the bottom of my feet. When he urged me onto my stomach, I craned my head to look back at him.

"How was your day?" I prompted. "Playroom, dorking around with your guys? Has it been good? Did you hear from the club about the job?"

He was still quiet—he was thinking about something, I could feel it like another hand pressing down on me. When the breath hissed over his teeth, I glanced back at him again. "I wrote Barbara and told her that—that I don't get how it all works on the other side, right, I don't get it at all. But…that she needs to take care of you. Be your _real_ angel." His fingers steeled into the muscles under my shoulder blades, lifting those bones to make them rise like wings. "And then I told her how much I missed her. What I missed. Like—senior year, when she'd show up at my apartment and toss me a box of macaroni, and we'd have dinner because she was so fed up with Stepmonster. Or when I'd take her out on Nicky dates—like the one time with the Ferris wheel, remember?"

"With the popcorn, yeah," I grinned. "I still can't believe you two. Who gets kicked off a Ferris wheel?"

"Me, baby, _me_," he announced, so proud. "Remember when Babs nearly set her hair on fire at Channukah?"

"And Emmy threw an entire glass of wine at her head?" I giggled. "Remember at Homecoming, when we tried to get a photo with the three of us, and the photographer was pissed, and Babsie was all, We're Mormon—"

"And the photographer went, 'I _am_ Mormon,'" Logan cackled, climbing off of me and sitting cross-legged. I used him to lift me up as he tapped my hands. "Prom, when Babs won Drunk Upperclassmen Bingo, and she kissed Abby right on the mouth?"

I clapped my hands. "Oh, oh—the photos for Senior Superlatives? And Miranda convinced Josh to take a photo of the four of us, but we wanted to do it in the tree, so you were climbing down as Babs was climbing up—"

"And she kicked me in the face, which made Miranda laugh so hard that she fell out of the tree and got the concussion, and then she was Randa's nurse—with the little outfit? And the hat and the Jell-O?" He started rolling back and forth across the mattress, clutching his stomach as he laughed. "Oh, God—when you guys stole my car—"

I slapped his arm and squawked, "I did not _steal_ your car! I gave you my car keys, thank you."

"Yeah, okay, revisionist history," he snorted. He waved his hands in the air. "Anyway, and then she called? And in the background, I could hear you crying, Emily yelling at the car, and Randa screaming, 'Don't touch that, it might explode!' And here's Babs, going all, 'So. Let's play a game, Logan, and that game is, What if your car is making this noise that sounds like an angry tiger?' And she started growling—and every time the yelling and the crying got louder, Babs growled louder and louder."

"You should have seen her!" I howled. "She was clawing the air with her hand, like, rrowl, rrowl." I batted at the air with my bent fingers. "Rrowl! Like it would help!"

He put his hand on his throat and started gasping. "Oh, oh, I didn't know that. I was just, like, what the fuck is going on, and why is Barbara growling at me?"

We battered back and forth in laughter, glancing at each other and bursting back into hysterical gasps. Each time one of us would calm down, I would growl, or he would pantomime chucking popcorn, and the laughing would start again, covering us both in a yellow, breathless joy that left us exhausted and warm.

I flopped back down on the mattress, pulling my sweatshirt back on to bake in the heat of this happiness. When his arms snaked around me, I sighed with such content that I was sure I would never run out of air. Out of air, out of energy, out of this wonderful feeling of being alive.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Lemme take your suitcase," Jeff offered, grabbing my bag.

"Thanks, Jeff," I smiled, fastening my earring in place. "What are your plans for the weekend?"

He leaned against the door frame. "Tomorrow? Sleep. Maybe go see a movie. Sunday, Kerry gets back in. I'm really pumped—she's gonna teach me to dive, and then I thought I'd take her out to dinner." He glanced behind him and lowered his voice. "Like, she wants me to go to church with her that morning. I'm trying to get out of it."

"It means a lot to her, Jeff," I said, standing up from the bed. "If she's asked you to come, that's big for her. And if I was you, I'd go."

Jeff rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to marry her. I just want to hook up with her, you know?"

"Hook up—kissing? Or hook _up_?" I asked, narrowing my eyes. "She's waiting until she's married, Jeff. Don't pressure her."

His eyes gleamed as he squinted at me, his mouth opening in a grin. "Girls say that a lot," he answered, winking before he left. My breath caught hard in my throat, and I wanted to shout after him. But Kerry could fight her own battles. Right?

I sighed, grabbing my purse and heading downstairs. Miranda was standing in the living room, her arms open as Emily rolled a lint brush over her body. "Seriously, did you snuggle with J.D.? You are just covered in doggie hair." Emily clucked, pressing hard on Miranda's back.

"I wanted J.D. to come with us to the beach," Miranda pouted, glaring at me.

I shrugged. "Logan's friend has a Labrador that J.D. loves to play with. That, and Athens is the most dog-friendly city in the world. It's like Georgia's bulldog mascot has translated into a cult of the dog—dogs in restaurants, dog in shops, dogs in movie theaters." I paused. "Well, not that far, but the first time we visited Mike down there, we saw more people with dogs in a two block radius of downtown Athens than in all of Chapel Hill. It's pretty sweet."

Emily ripped off the hair-matted tape of the roller. "I looked at Georgia—I remember liking Georgia. Why didn't I go there again?"

"Mountains," I reminded her.

"Ah, yes. And eighty-degree weather in December. God, do I love me some Arizona," she grinned. "I totally packed us a ton of snackies for the trip—wait. How long is the drive to Surf City again? Two hours?"

"Three," I corrected, and Emily grimaced, mumbling something about needing more cookies as she ran back into the kitchen.

"I packed lots of peppers and Ritz for you—I thought pregnant women loved pickles and ice cream or whatever," she giggled, dashing past Stacey to rummage in the cupboards.

I laughed. "Maybe if I'm lucky." I blanched and looked at my hands.

Stacey, though, grabbed my shoulders and gave me a light shake. "Dude! I'm so excited! I saw Jessi dance at Christmas in the Nutcracker, and she was so perfect, but, I mean, she was just a corps member there. A real, live starring role again! How cool is that!"

"Very cool," I grinned, watching Dawn tie the straps of her black halter dress tight behind her neck. She gave me a bug-eyed look, glancing at Stacey, and I let my head bob a bit, staring at our friend. "I've never seen _Cinderella_ before—I'm really excited."

"She _should_ be Cinderella herself, but Jessi said that there's politics," Stacey grumbled. "She's did the lead in their _Glow-Stop_, so she said she had to take a backseat in this one. Of course. The one that we get to see."

Miranda shrugged, taking a last sip of her soda before throwing it into the trash. Dawn let out a horrified gasp, and Miranda fished it out and stalked over to the recycling bins. "Better?" she smarmed at my sister, rolling her eyes. "Anyway, whatever. She's the Godmother—that's pretty damn hot in and of itself."

I glanced at the clock on the wall. "We need to hustle, guys, to get down to Raleigh on time. Is the car all packed?"

"Yup—let's move," Emily said, her hands full with Oreos as we scrambled out the back door. Stacey and Dawn got into the BMW as my girls and I got into the Buick, Miranda crammed in the back seat with a cooler and a big stack of beach towels.

We spent the whole ride down to the city listening to the ballet soundtrack, singing in high voices and swooping our arms around in imitation of the dancers. By the time we met Erin and Jeremy in front of the theatre, we were giddy with excitement, kicking out our legs in messy leaps and waving around the bouquets of flowers for Jessi with wild abandon.

"I have never seen a ballet that wasn't _The Nutcracker_," Erin squealed, the blue of her dress waving like water as she bounced on her toes. "This is so cool!"

"I'm really pumped, but I'm more excited for the beach," Jeremy whispered. "Do you mind if Erin and I skip dinner with you all and head for the ocean ahead of time?"

I shook my head. "Though, you might change your mind once you see Jessi dance. I mean, you can say that you met Jessica Ramsey back when she was just a mere Studio dancer. Like, if you were able to hang out with Michael Baryshnikov when he was in short pants."

Jeremy raised his eyebrows. "We have our swimsuits in the backseat of her car. We are so ready to hit the ocean—Mischa or not, I'm so pumped to swim."

I grinned, leaning against him. "How's work?"

He sighed. "Not as much fun without competing with you over analysis. The other girls are too well behaved. They don't like to get down and dirty with Freud like we do. No Vienna School wrestling."

"Well, it should take about a week for my meds to kick in—I emailed Dr. M, said that I might be feeling up to working again. He said that it depends on how the chemo is going, that he doesn't want me overtaxing myself. But—I miss it, Jerry," I admitted, putting my head on his shoulder. "I miss my work."

"Hey," he said, taking my hands. "Are you going to apply for the Truman?"

"Yeah, are you?" I asked.

"No way," he laughed. "Public service scholarship? No thanks. I'm in it for the cash. I was just thinking, you should apply for a Murphy Fellowship and a Hudson-Keilor scholarship, too. The Hudson loves a good sob story, and no one can top pregnant cancer patient."

I gasped, giving him a shove. "You are terrible!"

"I'm selfish—if you won those, then you'd have extra cash, right, and then you could spend it on me. We could go shopping? And every time you gave out your credit card, we could throw our heads back and laugh and say, 'It's on Murphy.' Ah ha ha ha!" he bellowed, flopping his hand above his chest.

"Or, I would use it on tuition and books so I could save my trust just in case my dad decides that he's completely cutting me out of his life," I said, my head falling down.

"Every time I think my dad is a dick about the gay thing? Your dad does something twice as horrific, and I feel better about myself," Jeremy said with a sad smile, rubbing my arm. "Come on, let's see us some frilly girls and sexy boys in tights."

"You have a boyfriend, a boyfriend that you love," I laughed, poking his side.

"Who's in Atlanta. Boys in tights are _here_," he shot back, tugging me by the hand as the rest of our group lined up at Will Call.

We walked through the halls to the theatre, reading off the description of the Carolina Ballet Company, the American Ballet Theatre's Studio Company, and the Studio's traveling tour. "She gets to go to ten cities and do this?" Erin breathed, tracing her finger over a sentence behind a thick glass. "Wow. Where are they off to next?"

"Miami—how freaking fun is that!" Stacey said, clapping her hands. "Jessi told me to come down there over the Fourth, but we have that big cookout at May's, so I'm not sure. South Beach? Cookout. South Beach? Cookout," she weighed with her hands. "Yeeeah."

I laughed, walking into the theatre, the red velvet walls rich with imitation gas lights, splashing gold circles down on the crowd. The huge chandelier gleamed over the audience, the crystals catching rainbows and dancing them around the molded ceiling, the ropes of plaster that wove squares from the back of the auditorium to the stage. Jessi had gotten us wonderful seats just in front of the balcony, the stretch of us in the center of the room.

"Look how pretty she is!" Dawn gasped, pointing at the black and white headshot of Jessi, so grown up, a face of sharp angles and smooth skin, a light ash in the photograph. Dawn crossed her hands under the nape of her neck, tilting her head and staring doe-eyed and solemn at me. "Do I look like her?" she said in a deep voice.

"No," I grinned.

"I'm a ballerina," Miranda sang, putting Jessi's picture in front of her face. She put the program in her lap and read, "'Jessica will join the American Ballet Theatre as a corps de ballet dancer in Fall of 2009.' That's so hot."

"I know," Emily smiled. "I can barely remember her from her year in Stoneybrook. All I really remember is her kicking it with Mallory Pike, and, like, when she did that thing with the synchronized swimmers. That was about it, right?"

"More or less," Stacey shrugged. "And baby-sitting. Jessi was born to dance."

And I felt that well of jealousy, that same feel I got when I saw Stacey sitting at the dining room table and flying through her economics work. When I watched Logan play. Emily write up an article, Dawn sing or lead a rally, Miranda perform a speech or a play. When I saw Kerry dive, or Erin calculate a chemistry problem with her eyes literally closed. All of them had such amazing gifts—how did it come so easy? Being athletic, being smart, being so sure of a gift that was born of their blood. Once, Logan had told me that he would have been a star at whatever sport he had picked.

We stood at the edge of the football field our senior year and watched the team practice for Homecoming, and his fingers laced through the metal of the gate. "I coudda been their best receiver—I'm fast, I can pick apart a defense really easy—it's like what I do on the court, you just anticipate where the other guys are gonna go and do the opposite. Fake 'em out and take the empty route, right? I woudda been the best, pretty girl, because I would have worked harder, I would have busted my ass, and I would have been the best."

He let out a steam of breath from his nose. "And then I would have gotten a broken leg, I bet."

"No," I scolded. "Who's that guy with the crazy last name. From Notre Dame, you dad said you could have been like…Jeff Sa-mar-ja? Sa-mar-gee-ah?"

"Samardzija," he said. "Probably." He stuffed his hands in his pockets. "He's real tall and not that meaty, either. He woudda been, like, my Kirk Hinrich, you know? Though there's no way in hell I'd go to Notre Dame. South Bend is in the middle of nowhere Indiana, and it is freakin' cold there, Mary Anne. Charlie Weis could come in and lick my ass, and I'd go hide behind the Mason-Dixon line."

"Are you sad that you didn't do football?" I asked. "That you let it go?"

Logan looked out at them and licked his lips. "You know what I see when I look at them?"

I shook my head, hooking my arm around his waist as his face grew dark.

"I see my dad." I watched his hands ball into fists in the tuck of his pockets. "They all look like my dad out there. And I just…I can't." He turned around and started walking to his car. It wasn't until he had turned over the engine, filling the car with heat that he opened his arms and crawled close to me for a hug. "I made a choice that day, _tesorina_. I chose not to be him. I've worked so damn hard, my body hurts every day, my legs just scream at me, I'm working so hard because I am not going to be him."

He rubbed at his nose and swallowed a thick gulp. "When my dad fought in the first Iraq war? You know what he put in his flak jacket? A photo of my mom and me, and his goddamned high school football medal. That's what he brought, that's what was over his heart when he risked his life. It's like my dad stopped growing the day he graduated. Maybe even the day he left Conant to go back home, maybe then." His voice was tripping over itself, wound up so tight in the sound of shoved-down tears. "I am going to sign with North Carolina in two weeks, and he's gonna know. He's gonna know that it's taken me four years, but I've scraped him off of me, Mary Anne."

I stroked my hands over his body as he kept saying, "I'm not him anymore. He's got nothing on me anymore, he's got nothing on me now."

Pulling back to put his face in my hand, I kissed him on both cheeks and whispered, "You didn't have to be the best player in America to show him that you were better. You don't have to do that, angel. You're a better _man_. That's more important than being a better athlete."

He shook his head, pressing against my palms. "But he doesn't see who I am. He doesn't see me at all. All he sees is how I play, and I've made damn sure that when I play, the only person he can see is Logan. And that Logan is better than Lyman ever was—that he could ever dream to be."

I held him close to me in a long silence, his strong body leaning against my tiny frame. He was so talented, off the court. Why wasn't that enough for him. Why couldn't he rest?

Maybe talent was a curse.

But Jessi was taking the stage in a billow of blue, her dress a water-bright candle around her mocha skin. She tossed her leg up in the air, almost perpendicular to the stage, touching her erect toe with the wand in her other hand. She swept that leg parallel with the ground and swooped so that it seemed that she was swinging without hips in an oval down to the floor and then going back to that straight posture before dipping back down again. She spun in twirls, her face effervescent and joyous as she circled around the ballerina Cinderella, the massive fluff of her tutu springing as she leapt into the air.

"She's perfect," Erin whispered in my ear.

"She's always been perfect," I said back. "Always."

When the show ended, we rushed to the stage to throw our flowers when she stepped forward for her solo bow. Her mouth gaped open in delight as she scooped up the single roses, and Stacey urged us to save the bouquets for backstage, but I plucked out a lily and tossed it to her. Jessi open and closed her fist in a thrilled wave at us before sweeping back into the line of dancers to allow Cinderella and the Prince their curtain call.

"We want Jessi! More Jessi!" Dawn hollered, sticking her fingers in her mouth to let out a piercing whistle. I gaped at her as she giggled, "Kristy taught me how to do that."

"Yeah, I thought I recognized that," Emily scowled. The dancers from the ABT Studio stepped back and applauded as the Carolina ballerinas took a final bow, and I elbowed Dawn to make her stop yelling for our friend.

"Let's go backstage!" Miranda begged, grabbing Emily and galloping off to the doors that abutted the stage. We had our names checked off the door manager's list and worked through the maze of rooms and corridors to find the dressing room marked _ABT-Ramsey, Smith, Sokoloff, Vartan, Zifkowitz_. Stacey pounded her fist on the door, and Jessi flung it open, squealing as she leapt into Stacey's arms.

Her makeup was half off of her face, half pancaked in place. "Did you like it?"

"Loved the show, adored you," Dawn gushed. She tossed her arms around Stacey and Jessi. "When do you get a solo tour, seriously!"

Jessi laughed, pushing the crown on her head back into place. "Yeah, that's me, Big Time. Not yet, guys. I gotta kill Julie Kent first."

"We can make that happen," one of the girls in the room growled. Jessi's face tightened in mock surprise, and she laughed again. Everyone gave her a hug and filled her arms with flowers, and she blushed.

"Meet me at the front doors in twenty minutes—I'm starved," she moaned. She bounced up on her toes, towering above us all, even Dawn. "Is it okay if we just go to the hotel restaurant around the corner?"

"That's great," Erin gushed. Jeremy gave her a look, and I heard her hiss, "Dude, she's a _ballerina_. I totally want to meet her."

"Do all little girls want to be ballerinas?" he asked as we left backstage. "Is it a universal fantasy?"

Miranda shook her head. "I didn't, too frilly and requires too much effort. On the other hand? My sister did, so go figure."

"How is your sister?" Stacey asked, watching Miranda and Emily light up cigarettes when we reached the alley. "Still insane?"

Shrugging, Miranda answered, "It's—well, she's doing really well at Miami. She's really thriving with the geology and shit—she just loves rocks. Right now, she's in Iceland looking at volcanic something or other to examine something about global warming. Whatever," she shrugged. "A big fat whatever. She's down to two piercings—my brother's all disappointed, he loved the studs under her lips—she's only kept the eyebrow and the tongue ones. But she's kept on her witch deal. Whatever. She's in Ohio, so I'm thrilled."

"How many people know that you're an identical twin?" Dawn said, raising her eyebrow.

"Other than SHSers? Zero. And we'll keep it that way," Miranda thudded, ashing her cigarette. "I was dating this guy, Abe? I would have told him that my sister is my twin, but then I dumped him." Emily and I nodded as Dawn frowned at Stacey.

"Wait," my sister replied. "I thought you really liked him—the rabbi's son, right?"

"Terrible kisser," Emily sighed. "He was trying to eat Randa's face. Such a deal breaker."

Stacey took in a sharp breath of air. "Say no more," she said, holding out her hand. "I've been there, too. You think you can train them?"

"But it's just a non-starter," Jeremy nodded. "You can teach someone how to have sex, but kissing? It's just like on _Sex and the City_. Bad kissing is like a chronic illness. It never goes away."

Erin laughed, covering her mouth with her hands. "Oh, honestly, you all are completely incorrigible."

"We've been 'round the block a few times," Jeremy grinned. "We _know_."

Glancing down at her watch, Erin twisted up her mouth. "If dinner lasts an hour and a half, we'll get to the beach at…one in the morning? Is that too late for a swim?"

"No," Emily declared. "I'm wearing my bikini under this dress, are you kidding? Beach me, babies."

Dawn gave Stacey a nudge. "Stacey has a question," Dawn prompted. Stacey twisted her hands together and glanced at the five of us.

"Um…could I come with?" Stacey said, and her face shaded over with a shyness that I had never seen in her eyes. "Go ahead and say no, I know this is totally last minute—I kept chickening out, if you can believe it," she said with a small laugh. "Um. I miss Barbara, and I know it's her birthday tomorrow? And I guess I wanted to help you guys celebrate a bit. I still—she sent me an email over that Christmas, and I never replied, and I…I'd like to come," she finished, her eyes skittering over our faces.

I looked at Emily. She leaned over, tugging Miranda close. "As long as we can be alone that night, I'm okay with it," she whispered.

"The ritual is just us," Miranda agreed. "But for the birthday dinner? It might be nice. Babsie loved poms so much, you know."

I nodded, pulling back to look at Erin. "Are you cool?"

"Did you pack a bag?" Erin asked, and Stacey nodded. "Well, then, I don't care—come ride in our car, if you want. The more the merrier, right?"

Stacey beamed, and Dawn rubber her shoulders. "See?" Dawn prompted. "I told you!"

"Now you can spend the weekend with your brother," Stacey said with a crisp nod. "You'll have a ton of fun together."

But from the way that Dawn's face clouded, her eyes drifting away, I knew. I knew. You could see him rising off of her skin—my sister was in love, and it was as clear as the smoke billowing up into the night.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jessi dumped her long body into a chair at the table. "So, so tired," she moaned. She gave me a weak smile. "Honestly, I don't think I'll make it too long tonight." Her arms stretched back in a yawn. "Do you mind if we just do appetizers, maybe dessert?" Dropping a hand on Stacey's shoulder, she twisted her mouth in concern. "That won't mess up your blood sugar, right?"

"Nope," Stacey smiled. "I ate dinner at the normal hour, just a light something. I think I'll do a salad and maybe a fruity treat of some variety."

"Mmm, treats," Miranda drooled. She gave Jessi a grin. "It's been, God, what, three years since we saw you dance? I swear, you've gotten even better since then."

With a modest dip of her head, Jessi answered, "Moving from the Onassis School to the Studio has just totally, absolutely changed my life. I mean, this is a real, live company. I know it's just the training corps for the ABT, but we're professionals, we live like real live dancers. And that shift from student dancer to professional dancer has been just incredible for me." She stuck out her tongue a little. "Kicking my butt, though. I am so desperate for the rest week after we go to Houston."

Jeremy sipped his water, flipping through the menu. "So, you join ABT in the fall—will you stay there forever?"

"I don't think I will? I mean, ABT is the best of the best, sure, but after I put in, like, five years, I can go to any other company in the country and be, at the very least, a soloist. Probably a principle." She gave Stacey a wicked look and said, "I know New York is the alpha and the omega, Stace, but I'm ready to see more. Between last year's tour and this, I just—I don't know. That, and if I could get into the Joffrey in Chicago, that would be incredible. Just amazing!"

Her eyes were so bright, it made my arms sizzle with excitement. "Oh, Jessi, I'm so happy for you!" I squealed.

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. "I'm really happy, too. That really hard period? Back when I was sixteen? It really helped me understand that I love this, and I do want to do this for as long as I can."

Emily blinked, her eyes moving between Stacey's and my nodding heads. "What happened?"

"Oh, I got into the Studio ahead of some other girls, and I had this pretty good idea that it was because I was black. That they wanted some 'diversity' in the company," Jessi said, rolling her eyes. "You know, other than Misty Copeland in the ABT, there are no black ballerinas. Hell, other than Misty, there are barely _any_ black ballerinas, especially soloists and principles, period. She and I have gotten tight, and we talk about it. And it's hard, it's hard to think that maybe you're not as good as you're being told, that it's, like, affirmative action in tights, right?" Jessi sighed, stretching her arms again. "And I wanted to earn it, I wanted this, _this_, to be mine. So, I had a real crisis of confidence, and then a larger question of, Do I want to be in a profession where this might be a question I ask all the time?"

"But…you're still in the Studio," Erin noted. "Are you okay with it?"

"As much as I can be," Jessi replied, taking a gulp from her water. "I'm not the best, not yet, I still have a lot to learn and work on, but I know that I am very talented, that I can really go far if I keep pounding it out. If I get some advantages because I'm black…Daddy said that I have to then take those advantages to become the best. Show everyone that no one can take a weakness and work it into a strength like me. I'm really lucky that I have a good support system—I have family across the river in Jersey, they totally save me."

Stacey gasped, putting her hands on her chest. "Which reminds me, when I go home in August, I'll totally help you and Keisha decorate your place."

"Awesome," Jessi beamed. "We're thinking, Garage Sale Chic. She's found us a hole in the freakin' wall near CCNY, you're going to throw up, it's so gross." Jessi clapped her hands and trilled, "I love it, naturally! It's my first, grown up apartment, it's so exciting!"

"Do you remember being young and excited?" Jeremy sighed.

"No, I've always been bitter and old," Miranda laughed, waving over the waiter.

As he took our orders, Jessi touched my arm. "Oh, here, this box?" She kicked her foot against a cardboard crate and explained, "Logan emailed me, asked if we could donate ballerina stuff to the playroom at the hospital? Those are for him—it's our old toe shoes, a couple costumes that just are unwearable for performance, but totally great for dress up, the dregs of make-up—stuff like that."

"Thanks, Jessi," I smiled. "Sorry, he had a birthday thing down in Georgia for an old friend of his from boarding school."

"Oh, whatever, guys hate ballet. Straight guys," she amended, giving Jeremy a knowing look. "My ex only came to see me dance because he had to."

Stacey spun her glass of water on the table. "You know, when you do your stop in Milwaukee later this month? You should totally meet up with _my_ ex, Dave. You two might really hit it off."

"He was cute," Jessi said, nodding her head. But she let her whole body shudder. "Stace, I couldn't swipe your old guy, that's wrong."

"Not really," I said, reaching behind Jeremy to poke Miranda.

"_Et tu_, May?" she scoffed, poking me back.

Dawn was giving Stacey a hard look. "It's a little different than the Great Lee Swap of '06, Stace. Besides. Dave's still in Africa until August."

"Right," Stacey mumbled. "I was just trying to help."

Jessi tilted her head, appraising Stacey. "I think I'm okay with guys. Thanks, though." She cleared her throat. "So, okay, I'm tired, so talk to me. What's Arizona like? I've always wanted to go there," she confessed, leaning over to tap Emily's hand.

We moved around the table, filling her in, Dawn and Miranda keeping us all in hysterics over their tales of the 2008 presidential campaign and Miranda's rotating cast of boyfriends. Erin just stared at Jessi the whole time, occasionally wriggling in excitement when I caught her eye. Little girls who want to be ballerinas. My hand drifted down to my belly. Was this a girl? Would she want to be, too?

I thought of Logan, how his entire life was basketball, books, and toothbrushes. Would I want my child to be like that? So alone, so many demands?

Maybe it wasn't so bad to be someone like me.

I felt so tired suddenly—it was hard to be me nowadays. To stay me.

"May?" Dawn prompted. "Jessi asked how you were."

I shrugged. "I'm okay. A bit tired."

"That's why I'm driving," Miranda winked, licking the back of her ice cream spoon.

I forced my face into a smile. When did everything get so heavy? "Yep. Everything's good." And I willed everyone else at the table to smile with me. To not let Jessi know about the depression. The miscarriage. I hadn't told her more than _I'm sick, I got married, I'm pregnant_. Nothing more. The circle of people who knew was too wide for me, and no matter how much I liked this girl at the table, she didn't have the hold on my heart like the others.

It's not that I didn't want to let her in—it's that there was only so much room. And I was too empty right now. I couldn't share what I didn't have.

Jessi reached down into her tote bag. "Well. After each show, our toe shoes are just destroyed. We'll give them away and stuff. So. Who wants one of my slippers?"

"Me!" Erin yelped. Jessi laughed, pulling out a shoe and a Sharpie, signing the sole. She handed it to my friend who pressed it to her heart. "Oh, oh! I always wanted to be a ballerina, but I was like a friggin' bowling ball with pudgy pink legs back when I took lessons."

"Erin," I warned, but she was too busy glowing at Jessi to notice me.

Pulling out her other shoe, Jessi signed the sole. "This—well, Aunt Cecelia says that if the pregnancy is hard, it's probably a girl. A bit of foreshadowing," she laughed. "And Stacey says that you've had kinda a rough ride, so let's just call this a bit of wishful thinking." She held out the slipper to me. "For the baby."

I turned the blue shoe over and read, _From Aunt Jessi, with love._

And I looked up into her eyes, and I knew—she knew. Did Stacey tell her? Did it matter? She knew, she knew it all. Her hand met my own, and she said, "I want baby's first ballet show? To be mine. Fly her up, I'll give her a real good time. But I want it to be my show that she sees."

Because my baby will make it. My baby will live.

I tried, I tried so hard not to think what came next. I tried, but the sink of my sad, tired mind grabbed hold. My baby will live. Will I?


	19. Chapter 17: Part I: Her

My head was stone, locking me down against the bed. I unfolded my fingers against the linens, the sharp scent of the ocean coating the room in a salty thickness. The sheets were soft, the blankets warm against the cool air of the house, but all of the balance and comfort couldn't stop the ache pulsing from the middle of my burned chest. The nausea of carrying a baby, carrying chemo in my blood.

The sickness in my head. It was still here—of course it was. It couldn't be magically chased away. Once, Dr. Paves told me that there was no magical wand in mental health, nobody would come and miraculously wipe depression away. But I wanted it to. I would give everything for that.

But I wouldn't be Mary Anne if that happened.

And more than anything, I wanted to be _her_.

My head wouldn't yield as I tried to sit up straight, move, get out of this bed. I was trapped. I was sick, I was trapped, and my voice was unhinged. There was so much I wanted to say, to Emily sitting in an armchair by the window with a large book in her lap, to my friends who must be outside, lounging on the beach. To so many people who weren't here.

They weren't here.

Dad. Dad. Where are you right now? Are you thinking of me?

My mind went to my father, but my eyes stayed dry. I didn't have tears to waste on him.

I let my finger flex over the pink-floral pattern of the sheets, trying to unnumb them, trying to unstick my mind from the tar of all of this. I didn't trust myself right now—not to speak, not to think. In a moment like this, if I were sick and rushed to the hospital, I shouldn't be the one to make the decisions. I might not do what I should.

Do whatever it takes to live.

This is why I married Logan. This is why he is my husband. He will keep me alive, even when the lean in my head pushes me to do things that will not. Logan will keep me alive.

I shut my eyes, inhaling, the deep breaths that I do to push the feeling of vomit away, as if that would work here and give me strength. The ability to get up.

I missed him. I missed the sound of his voice. I pulled his picture out of my mind and planted it in the backs of my eyes, letting it grow wild in my memory. This is the man who loves you. This is your husband.

Think of Logan's voice, and get out of bed.

_Come on, pretty girl, you gotta do it yourself, okay?_

I opened my eyes, his voice ringing in my head like bells. He will keep me alive.


	20. Chapter 17: Part II: Him

**Part II: Him**

Miranda and Emily were chatting with Mary Anne in a circle in a corner of the OB's waiting room. Me on the outside, watching. Emily had given Mary Anne all of her articles from the past year, a shoebox of photographs and diary entries and letters, so that my wife could turn it all into a scrapbook. Mary Anne was so good at organizing, so good at making order from jumbles, from crazy heaps, bringing sense to where there wasn't anything at all.

To me.

Last summer, she had left almost immediately for the cancer camp in Massachusets. It took me a full week to sort through all of the boxes of my things at the house that I was subletting with a bunch of others guys from the team before I realized how much was missing. Pictures, magazine and news clippings, my own journals of the past year. Gone, all of it gone. I called her in a panic—I didn't want them front and center, in fact, I wanted them jammed away in a hidden place, away from my ego and other people's eyes. But still, I wanted them.

It took a few minutes for the camp administrators to track her down, but soon the phone bloomed with the sugar sound of her voice. "Hey, angel, I thought we had a date at eleven tonight."

"I know, I'm sorry, but I've been trying to find all of my stuff of the past year—like, Tess, where are the _Sports Illustrated _articles about the team? Where are the press photos? Do you remember where we packed them? Are they maybe with your stuff in storage?" I asked, twisting my finger around the drawstring of my pants.

"Nope. I have it all. And I grabbed some junk from your folks' place, too," Mary Anne chirped. "I've got an idea."

"Pretty girl, I—"

"Trust me," she urged.

So I did. I always did. When she arrived back four days before school began, I wrapped her in my Mary Anne-hungry arms, spinning her in a circle in the driveway. It had been a month since I went to see her on parents' weekend. A month without her. She wouldn't stop kissing me, bolting my face to hers. We grew dizzy from contact and tumbled into the grass of the front lawn, giggling and rubbing our noses together, and just being stupid at the feel of the other's skin, just because we _could_.

Mary Anne sprung up, though, and told me to wait as she ran to the car. "Close your eyes, love," she commanded, and I slapped my palms over my eyes like patches, making my sight a thing of darkness. She came back to me and plunked something heavy in my lap. "Open," she breathed.

Two huge photo albums were in my lap. _Freshman Year, Book One_, the first had embossed on its blue leather cover. "What is this?" I asked, opening it up. Not a photo album. A scrapbook, with fancy paper behind each picture, each article and clipping, my own notes and memories in the cursive that I had began using this past year instead of my old boxy script. There were little embellishments, tiny mylar balloons around the photo of me signing the National Letter of Intent on the first page, small sneakers around my training schedule. Heading and captions in calligraphy and set off with scalloped edges.

"Mary Anne?" I asked, flipping through a few pages before looking at her.

"This is better than you stuffing everything in a plastic container," Mary Anne reasoned. "It's everything from this season—and this year, too. See?" She turned to a page near the front that was headed, _Mary Anne turns 18—the first day of the rest of our life._ Stickers of lilies and hearts on water-colored paper, the dried petals of the roses I gave her, three photos on the page—one from dinner, one from the planetarium show I had taken her to, and one that we had snapped alone in the hotel that night.

"All of it's here," she continued, showing me the team photos, candids from our games and away trips, the articles booming _Tar Heels Cruise Against Wake Forest, UNC Inside Tandem Hand Duke First ACC Defeat. _I grinned as I touched _With Lawson Injured, Bruno Leads Tar Heels Past Florida State_. "Whatever, that's where Veron scored a shit ton of points."

"Yeah, but the hysterics before that game of, How can we win without Superstar! thus begged for you to prove that you were good enough—and you so totally were," she beamed.

I rolled my eyes. Could she be any more supportive? "_Tesorina_, you, Erin, Jenny, and Jeremy plus a ham sandwich could have beaten FSU."

"I don't know," Mary Anne said slowly. "I think Jeremy might have eaten that ham sandwich by halftime. We might have been down a man."

Pulling her into my arms, I whispered, "Thank you, thank you so much. This is incredible, Mary Anne, it's more than I could have ever dreamed of."

"It was fun!" she protested. "This is so much fun for me. I swear, the highlight of senior year was when you let me teach you about organization."

"If the whole psych thing doesn't work out, you should totally be one of those people who comes in and saves a person from clutter and chaos," I declared, kissing her.

She smiled. "I am my father's daughter sometimes, you know."

I did. Fathers, daughters.

I stared across the waiting room at Mary Anne, at her growing belly. Was that my daughter?

Don't think like that. Not when it could end. Not if it had to end to save her.

"Emmy, there are no dates on here!" Mary Anne was sighing, staring at the photos. "And it's not like there's, oh, snow on the ground so I can guess at the time of year."

"I can write on the backs when it is," Emily offered, taking back the photographs. "Do you want that?"

"Please. And who they are, so I can put their names in the margins." Mary Anne shifted in her seat, and I watched her grimace as she bent her chest—how much pain was she in from this morning's radiation? "Randa, I'll totally make one for you, I told you."

"Dude, I am not one to look behind. I go forward. Behind is boring," she sniffed, shooting me an acidic look. I rolled my eyes, sticking my tongue out at her. Karis and I were still good friends, and she and I had been a lot more serious than Miranda and I had ever been. Why did Miranda delight in torturing me?

"Because she knows she can get to you," Mary Anne had told me years ago.

Still. It was annoying. Moreso because I knew Mary Anne was _right_.

I glanced down at my watch. How much longer? Waiting, waiting—doctors were always making you wait. I adjusted the book in my lap, a biography of FDR that I couldn't concentrate on. I was ready to hit the road, go see my old friend Mike from Oak Hill, a forward on the Georgia team. It would be nice to be with my friends for awhile, to sluff off all of Dawn and Stacey and their issues, Jeff and his odd hero worship, the way Jeff was chasing after my sister. The way Kerry seemed to like it. The lost baby. Mary Anne's sadness.

She seemed so happy now, Miranda and Emily at her side. Them and Dr. Paves, they reached into her heart and ballooned it back up. I struggled against my jealousy—Dr. Paves said that sometimes, hearing the same thing in a different voice was what Mary Anne needed. It wasn't me. It was her.

It wasn't me she needed now, it was her girls, their love. I knew enough not to force myself, my way on her. But it still stung a little—Mary Anne was sinking down around me, but with them, she was picking up the pieces. It didn't matter how, it only mattered that my Mary Anne came back.

Under her tired eyes, the dull rounds of her lovely eyes, her cheeks were pink, her face exploding into that smile as she laughed at something Miranda said. I felt myself rise up—that, that girl was my Mary Anne again.

I crossed my fingers, hoping that her medication would buoy her back.

A nurse stepped into the waiting room. "Bruno?" she called.

"Spier," Emily, Miranda, and I called back, Mary Anne snorting a grin into her hand.

"No, Bruno. Logan. Dr. Chaplin wants to talk to you," the nurse rolled her eyes. I pointed at my chest, and she nodded, tapping her toe in an annoyed beat.

"Lee, are you in trouble?" Emily said in a mock gasp.

Miranda leaned forward on her knees. "You're pregnant, aren't you. You slut."

"Bite me, Randa," I snapped. I glanced at Mary Anne, and she puckered her lips in a kiss and shrugged, her fingers digging back into Emily's box as I followed the nurse back into the examination rooms.

I sat in a chair next to the small desk, and the doctor bounced in, her ponytail swinging like a cheerleader's, as she plopped down on the stool beside me. "So! How are you?" she grinned, slapping Mary Anne's thick file on the counter. Mary Anne, a mass of paper. As if you could know her by that.

"Fine," I said, narrowing my eyes at her. "How are you?"

"Concerned," she sighed, and I felt my veins ice over. "Have you heard word out of Auburn? They might start that freshman at quarterback. I mean, could you doom the season a little more?"

My laugh jumped out of my mouth. "Well, your senior is about as capable as a broken down Ford Pinto. Give the kid a little bit of faith, Doctor."

"I suppose," she grumbled, drumming her fingers on the file. She shook her head and let out an annoyed breath. "Honestly, I think the BCS series has it out for the SEC, right, so why condemn ourselves to a rough start? Try out Hanson, see if he's perhaps gotten his game back, and then throw the infant in there if you have to."

I shrugged. "I don't know, I think Tuberville probably knows something we don't about your 'infant'—and I don't mean to be rude, but are we going to discuss football or what?"

Dr. Chaplin smiled, spinning a bit on the stool. "I just wanted to see how you were."

"Me?" I frowned. "I'm fine. I'm not the one who had the miscarriage. Who's pregnant and has, you know, just a raging case of cancer."

She hooked her hands behind her head and pressed her arms back in a stretch. "No one really asks the dad how a miscarriage effects him. And I have a feeling—from what I've read about you, which might not be fair, but…I've heard that you take losses very personally. You're the kind of player that loses on a Saturday and spends all of Sunday at the gym. So—you lose a baby…how have you been dealing with it?"

I leaned back against the wall and shoved out a hiss of hot air. "I just…love her, you know? She's been—like, when we lost to UCLA? I was getting hate mail like you wouldn't believe for missing that shot, even a death threat or two, which would have been funny if, you know. And Mary Anne was there every second, just being so supportive and kinda nursing me out of my funk. For two weeks, she brought me cookies and dinner, and she'd rub my shoulders and give me flowers—she even lent me her teddy bear," I blushed. "When I didn't want to talk, she'd just sit and do her homework. When I had to go to the gym and stand where I had missed the shot and make it over and over, she'd sit there on the court and read a book. She was incredible," I murmured, looking down at my hands. My imperfect hands. "It's my turn now, my turn to carry our hurt."

"But not all by yourself—do you have someone to talk to?" the doctor pressed, the shine of her pink nails catching in the light. She reminded me of Stacey somehow—the old Stacey, maybe who Stacey would have been had she not been hurt.

I shrugged. "My best friend is in Africa right now, though he's been calling. And I have my sister, but I hate leaning on her too hard—she's like me, she has a lot of pressure on her to be perfect." I thought of my father and burned beneath my skin. "I can take a lot, you don't need to worry about me."

"A therapist?" she asked, tipping her head at me.

"I email a lot with my old high school therapist—she's real close with Mary Anne, so she has good advice for me. And the team has a shrink for us, and he just said to do what I always do: put it on the court. So I do," I said, thumping my fists on my thighs. "It's been like this since I was fourteen. The only thing I can trust is that ball, right. It's made me into who I am. I think I'm luckier than most because I took control of who I was, emptied out who I was becoming and what I didn't like. I wrapped myself around the ball and put back things in me that I liked." I began scratching my neck; I could feel it feeling with a scaly heat. "One of the things I like best about myself is my patience, how I don't break down on the outside." I let out a nervous laugh, looking down at my feet. "Go read my scouting report—it says I'm pretty unflappable."

She kept looking at me. "You took that miscarriage pretty hard, didn't you."

"She'll never know," I said, finally looking back.

She bit down over her lower lip, gnawing on the skin above her chin. "You need to talk to your wife. You can't hide that kind of stuff from her. It doesn't mean that you're carrying her pain any less to admit that you're hurting, too."

"I can't—especially not if we end the pregnancy. I don't want her worrying about me, you don't understand, Doctor. My wife will worry so much about how I'm hurting that she'll put herself second. I can't risk that. I'm gonna be the strong one. I'm gonna be the strong one for her, and she's going to make the right decisions for her and not worry about me. I'll be fine," I declared, pressing down on my legs.

"Can I say something forward?" Dr. Chaplin blurted out. "Mary Anne has said this, in front of you, and just a couple other times that make me wonder—her dad. Where is her dad?"

"Her dad isn't speaking to her. He doesn't handle her cancer well, and the pregnancy really sent him for a loop. Her mother died, leaving him when Mary Anne was just a baby, and he kind of freaked, abandoning her with her grandparents—and I don't think he ever recovered," I admitted.

She reached forward and twisted her fingers into my wrist. "Don't be her dad, Logan. Whatever it is that her father did to become a guy that makes her get teary when she mentions him? Don't be him."

She stood up, squeezing my arm tight again, before walking out the door. I stared down at my hands, at my feet, at the floor. Don't be Richard, don't be him. What did he do?

Kept it all inside. Kept it all quiet, let it eat him away. Made him into a man of ice, freezing his daughter out. Chipping apart into pieces whenever the ghost of his wife appeared in his daughter's body, her illness, her life.

I didn't want to be Richard, her father.

I didn't want to be Lyman, my father.

I wanted to be a better man. A stronger man. A man worth Mary Anne.

How?

The door opened again, and my wife slipped in, her brow creased deep as she shut the door behind her. "Dr. Chaplin said that Randa and Emmy needed to give me ten minutes. And then _she_ told me that she'd be back in ten minutes." Mary Anne came over to me and sat in my lap, winding her arms around my neck. "Why do we need these ten minutes?"

I ran my fingers though the curls of her hair. When her hair first grew back into this deep, almost black mass, it came in wavy, looser than Miranda's curls, a shadow of the relaxed spirals that she permed back in junior year. Her _Felicity_ hair, her girls all called it. It looked like a halo, making her eyes wider, her face shine like a star. The first day I saw her when I came back to SHS, she had curled her hair up, all special for the first day of the semester.

I had turned around from my locker, already dizzy with how loud and busy the school was. And I saw this girl with curly hair walk by with another girl, both stopping at a locker across the hall. I remember what she wore because it still was so strange, to see people dressing different from each other. She wore a white button down, a green short-sleeved argyle sweater on top. Preppy—but then there was this red skirt that showed off the most amazing pair of legs. Sexy. Incredible. Who was she? From Stoneybrook Academy? I couldn't see her face, her head turned so she could listen to that other girl who I vaguely recognized with a huge mass of red spiral curls bouncing down to her shoulders. The brunette was nodding, the red head was wrenching her hands into her hair, and I could _not_ see the brunette's face before I had to go to the counselor's office to finalize my schedule.

Who _was_ she?

I saw her again in my advanced algebra class; she rushed in before the bell in a cloud of giggles, bent too close to one of the Schillabar twins for me to see her face. The brunette slipped into a chair in the front row, pulling out a pair of copper cat's eye-style glasses while the twin—Melinda? Melinda Schillabar?—threw herself into the chair next to me with a dramatic huff.

"Nerds sit in the front," the twin said, too loudly, and I heard the brunette blow a raspberry, her face still looking straight ahead. They seemed like really good friends. I stiffened: once, Kristy Thomas had been tight with the Schillabars, Mary Anne said. What if Kristy was friends with them again? What if the brunette was _Kristy_?

I might slit my wrists if the hottest girl in school was now Kristin Amanda Thomas.

My mind flashed on an image of my mother, and I felt like I was going to throw up. I turned away from the twin and willed for the teacher to start class. To make my mother and that blade and that blood go away. _Go away_.

I needed to practice—I'd go to the gym during lunch, make it go away. I raced out of math and to the gym, working out for an hour in my jeans and an Oxford—it felt so strange to not wear a uniform. The odd feel of the denim on my legs. To choose what I would look like. To not have other people in the gym with me, fighting me for hoop time.

For an hour, it was just me and the ball, and I began to feel at home. And then lunch ended. And the fear came back. And my mother came back. And the ache in my chest that was shaped like my ex-girlfriend came back. But so did the image of the brunette. Who was she?

And where were my friends—not the guys, we saw each other in gym. The girls. Stacey and Claudia and Abby. Even Kristy. Dori and Cokie. And why hadn't I seen Mary Anne Spier? I should have emailed her. I should have done a lot of things before I came back, but I didn't have time. I needed more time to get ready for this.

I didn't recognize her. The next day, her bob was straight, brushing under her chin in a bright gloss of tawny hair. And I lost my ability to breathe when I realized that the beautiful slip of a girl with those awe-inspiring legs was my Mary Anne. No. Not my Mary Anne, not anymore.

I watched her fling herself against a locker four away from mine, resting her head on a girl's shoulder. Emily Bernstein—I rccognized _her_. "Okay, so I did the chem homework for the week? It's evil. This class is evil."

"For the week?" Emily squeaked. "You're evil."

"Evil…like lasagna?" Mary Anne giggled, bouncing on her toes. She tucked her hair behind her ears, her eyes shining the same shade as those glasses. It was like the sun opened right up, here in the dank hallway, as Mary Anne smiled. This gorgeous person—my pretty girl. And then those eyes met mine, her mouth falling open in a gape. "It is you," she breathed, walking around Emily to stare at me. "I heard this rumor that SHS recruited two guys from a place called Oak Hill, and I thought, Logan went to Oak Hill, but Logan disappeared off the face of the earth a year ago, so it couldn't be him. But it's you."

I winced. She didn't know anything. She wouldn't—and I wouldn't let her. The back of my thigh ached—phantom pain. The wood eating at my skin. The sin in my skin. "Yeah, it's me. I meant to email, but I felt lame to say, Sorry I haven't talked to you in forever, but hi and stuff/"

She walked up and put her arms around me, squeezing me tight. "Well, whatever—I'm glad to have you back! Are you settling in okay, classes good? Do you need the low down on the teachers and stuff?"

Before I could say _Yes, that would be great. Yes, please. Yes, let's have dinner, and hopefully you can help me—my heart is broken because my mom is sick, and my girlfriend dumped me in the most horrible way, but you're so beautiful that I haven't been thinking about Karis for the first time in weeks, yes, please, Mary Anne_, Emily slammed her locker shut and slid up to us, eyes in sharp slits.

"I'm supposed to interview you," she spat. "For the paper. I'm your beat writer." In a tone that said, _I am being tortured._ Great. If she was any more hostile, I would burst into flames. "You and the other kid."

"He arrives tomorrow—he's finishing up his exams down in the city. We'll both be in the game on Friday, though," I said, and Emily rolled her eyes.

"Well, you better, considering what they're giving you," she snorted, glaring at me again. I frowned at her, and Mary Anne raised her eyebrows, but Emily gave her head a disgusted shake. "Basketball. Why not football? My dad likes football, he could have explained that for me at least. This is such horseshit." Her eyes daggered at me again. "Weren't you supposed to be Mr. Star Football? What happened with that? Why couldn't you just do that instead?"

"Emmy," Mary Anne warned.

"May," Emily whined back. May? What was that?

Mary Anne smiled at me again, and it hit me in my chest, sinking below my rib cage and spreading all over my body in a heat that reminded me of a fire. A feel that reminded me of coming home, of being perfectly at home. "Call me," she urged, putting her arm around Emily's. "We'll get together, and I'll give you the total scoop of SHS, okay?"

"Maybe after the game," I suggested, my mouth moving before I could stop it. Running over the lump that felt like Karis lodged in my throat.

Her face sunk a bit, sympathetic and dipped in regret. "I'm sorry, I'm going to the Day School's Winter Ball with Pete—Talbert? Pete Black's cousin?"

"You two are still together?" I asked, blinking at her. A year and a half. We hadn't made it a full year. Karis and I had made for over a year. And then, and then…

Emily smiled, poking Mary Anne. "May and Pete, the cutest not-couple." She clapped her hands. "Okay, let's go hit AP Lang like a stepchild."

"Emmy!" Mary Anne shouted, giving her a shove. She rolled her eyes at me. "Ignore her, she's having a day."

Emily Bernstein was always having a day. And wasn't she a lesbian? Dori had told me that. This was moving too fast, why couldn't everything just stop and slow down, why couldn't I go home? Where was home? Not here. And not there. I leaned into my locker, the bare bones of my life. Where did I belong?

On the court. At least I had that. I could find me there.

When I looked back up, my Mary Anne was walking away. No. Not my Mary Anne. Someone else's Mary Anne. And I wasn't going to mess that up, I wasn't going to intrude. I could find my own way here, I could find everything I needed.

I glanced at my schedule—Italian IV. The language I had spoken since childhood. Comfort. A good first step. That I would take on my own.

I made my way through that school on my own until late February. And then I had Miranda. And then I didn't.

And then Mary Anne became my Mary Anne again.

I wasn't alone anymore. I wasn't expected to be alone anymore—I had a wife. I had a wife, and she was sitting on my legs, her arms around my neck, and she was leaning into me and kissing me and whispering my name. The name she had given me. _Angel, angel_.

Swallowing, I forced myself to speak. "Pretty girl, I need—last Friday, I took it all so hard. That fight we had…and then the idea of losing you…I freaked out pretty bad, only Shawn saw it, but I didn't handle it so well. I haven't told you because I didn't want you to worry about me, but I—fell apart inside, Mary Anne, I did."

"I love you," Mary Anne replied, pulling me to meet her lips. Her finger rode on the skin of my lower back. _We are together in this._

So I wrote back, _Promise?_

_You're my husband. We have to be an us._

I closed my eyes and breathed, "I don't want to be your dad, _tesorina_."

"I don't want you to be him, either." She let out a small gasp and heaved out a sob. "I don't want you to be either of our fathers."

And I balled my fists as if I were linking my fingers through the chain link of a fence, staring down at the lake below and making the decision that would change my life. Make it _my_ life. But nine days before that happened, I made the first decision, the first step.

When I knew: I would not be Lyman Agosto Bruno. I would not be the son he wanted me to be.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It went like this: we graduated from eighth grade, we had a dance. Dori took me to a party at Cokie's, and we made out on Cokie's sister's bed, and she shoved my hand up her shirt, laughing at me when I leapt back, saying it was too fast.

"Are you twelve?" she smirked. "Come on, Logan, don't be a 'fraidy cat." She leaned back in a feline curve, pushing up her chest. I knew, RJ had touched her like that. Austin, too, probably. Maybe others. I was just another in a string of guys.

But she was so cute, the chestnut tumble of her hair falling over my shoulders, and she wanted me. She wanted me, the press of her body said. I was worth wanting. So I put my hand up her shirt like she wanted, like I didn't, and I held her there until I convinced myself that this was the life that I had. And it was okay.

The next day, I was on a plane to Italy, and I spent ten days on the beach, coating myself over with a deep tan and sleeping under the sun. My cousin Bianca stuffed me with shots of limoncello, taking me on drunken rambles through the mountainous routes of the city on the back of her Vespa,

"This isn't very masculine," I yelled into the wind, clutching at her waist, my rusty Italian fumbling that last word. Aunt Francesca had told me to speak in English to Bianca, but my cousin had declared English to be boring. _Facile_.

"You can walk, you know," she called back, revving the whining engine as we ascended to a small pub that ignored the fact that neither of us were sixteen. She took me to a sidestreet crusted with cobblestones and taught me how to play soccer—no, _futbol_, driving the ball at my head with crushing speed.

"You should meet my friend Abby—total soccer nut and totally good, too," I said as we ran back to the beach and into the sea.

Bianca rolled her eyes, climbing up onto a rock. In English, she sniffed, "American soccer girls. Abby probably yanks off her shirt, yes—'Gooooal! I am so hot, American, woo woo!' Please. _Prima Italia, si_!" And she did a backflip into the water, cajoling me to follow her lead.

So I did. Why not. What did I have to lose? At worst, I'd crack my head open.

That wouldn't be so bad.

I spend another two days in Rome with my mother's half-sisters, boisterous women who were loud where my mother was quiet. What if my grandfather had never immigrated after his wife died, what if these daughters had decided to come with him to that strange land of _Il Miss-pippi_. What if my mother hadn't been alone. I listened to the bells of the Vatican clang out the hour, and I sat on their balcony, eating gnocci and reading _Captain Corelli's Mandolin_, grinning at each spot where my Aunt Andria had smeared it with tears.

"Such a good book," she said, sniffing with nostalgia as she handed it to me when I asked for something to read. Something in _English_, please.

By the end of it, I could feel my estrogen levels rising. It was time to go home.

But I had to go to Louisville. Lewis and his great ideas—he reminded me of Kristy Thomas sometimes, these great schemes and plans that usually backfired. _Let's try smoking!_ Nearly burned a couch. _Let's bike to Cincinnati!_ An hour into the ride, nearly died with exhaustion. _Let's break into Papa John's Stadium and pretend we play for U of Louisville!_ Nearly got arrested.

_Lloyd broke his leg—take his place and come with me to the Kentucky basketball camp! It'll be great!_ he shouted over the phone, over Bianca roaring out a pub song with her sister Allegra, over Hunter and cousin Gino bouncing on the couch while watching a dubbed over television show.

Bleary with alcohol, I found myself saying yes.

Stupid, stupid—look what drinking got me. A mess, that's what. I'd get home at eight in the morning, maybe get a few hours of sleep, then the big family reunion for my grandfather's birthday, and then I'd have to go to a basketball camp? Where I was required to _move_? Stupid, stupid. No more drinking, ever.

As I rode the escalator down to baggage claim, I shook off my exhaustion as my cousins Sosie and Susie came into view. Sosie, thin and lean in cut-offs and a UK shirt, Susie, her belly bulging under the University of Louisville shirt. I rolled my eyes; the Stevenson twins would never do something like this. Brunos. We were always competing.

With each other. With ourselves.

They threw their arms open as I ran towards them. "Favorite boy cousin!" Sosie crowed, smashing me into a hug. "How was Positano? How were Marco and Francesca and Legia little Gino?"

"Great, fantastic—they're really good. Hunter was there for a week, and he and Gino are thick as theives," I grinned, kissing her cheeks before hugging Susie as close as I dared. I didn't want to hurt her, hurt the baby.

"And Bianca?" Susie prompted. "Still insane?"

"A hellion on a Vespa," I laughed, pulling back my face in a fake grimace.

Sosie slapped her hand on her forehead. "That girl—honestly, Uncle Lyman and Aunt L'Rose are the last two to figure out that no kid under sixteen should be left alone with that nut job."

Rubbing her belly, Susie sighed, "It's because Francesca was Ly's favorite cousin. He refuses to think ill of Bianca, despite the mounting evidence. I swear, Logan, you should sit Kerry down and give her a massive talking to before she goes over or else your sister will come back a changed woman. Bianca will take her cliff diving, and if Kerry doesn't break her neck? She'll become a thrill junkie just like ol' Bee."

"I love Bianca," Sosie crowed, dancing back and forth on her toes. "My hero. Italy should draft her for the Army, she'd be the best General. Hell, _we_ should draft her. She'd scare the bejesus out of the insurgents in Iraq, send 'em screaming back into their caves."

"Somebody's ready to enlist," I teased, walking over to the luggage carrel.

She let out an aggravated sigh. "I just gotta finish up at the U, then med school, and _then_ I can get over there. Loretta and Leah both say that they need doctors out there—I'm thinking of just being a medic? But they said that I need to be patient." Her face clouded. "They said that by the time I'm done, it'll still be going on."

"It's been, like, the summit of the Joint Cheifs back at the house. You've got Leah representing the Marines, Christian the Navy, Loretta's beating the Army drum, and your little sister somehow thinks she's qualified to speak for the Air Force," Susie giggled.

Sosie smirked, "Well, with some of the decisions that the Pentagon is making, it kinda seems like an eleven year old _is_ running the show. I'd put Kerry in charge. She has good hair."

I doubled over in laughter. "That means something?"

"That means everything," she nodded, solemn-eyed.

I shook my head, waiting for my bags to arrive. "So. How are the wedding plans?" I asked Susie, staring at that stomach. Twenty and pregnant. She seemed so excited, she swore that she'd finish school and get her master's degree, just like she had planned. With a baby? And _Daryl Banks_ as her husband? The same Daryl Banks who stole the goat from St. John's and dyed it in the orange colors of Sacred Heart? That man was going to be a father?

The world was as insane as my cousin Bianca.

The world was a place where a wonderful girl's house could burn down, taking everything from her in an instant. Except her life. But she wasn't the same. And now we weren't either.

_Think of Dori_, I commanded myself. The long tanned skin. The yellow-light shower of her hair, the hint of red under the blonde. She was so damned cute. No: hot. Think about Dori. I breathed through that moment, and trained myself to listen to Susie rattle on and on about the wedding.

"And an empire waist dress, of course," she added, touching her stomach.

Sosie let out a fake sneeze. "White trash!"

"Screw you," Susie snapped. "Who got the full ride to U of L, and who's ROTC at the big ass boring state college?"

"Who's so knocked up? Tell her that she looks totally knocked up," Sosie said, poking me.

I winced. "Sorry, Suz. You look totally knocked up." But I put my hand on her shoulder. "But not white trash. Sos is the one in the cut-offs. That's some hillbilly shit, straight up."

The twins threw back their heads in laughter. "Favorite boy cousin, totally," Sosie said. "Come on, let's get you home so you can nap. Lewis is throwing down some total trash talk about the UK camp tomorrow—I expect you to be Michael Jordan on his ass, understand?"

As if. I tried to stifle a sigh as my bags came tumbling down the belt like a mountain of snow. Does my family ever stop?

When I got to Uncle Leo and Aunt Cathy's—my cousin Lewis's parents—my mother wrapped me in a large hug as Kerry and Hunter tugged at my hands. Dad came over and thumped my back, a Bloody Mary in his other hand as an old USC/Notre Dame game played on the sports classics channel in the background.

"Want to watch the game?" Dad said, gesturing over to the couch with his drink.

"He needs to sleep," Mom replied, kissing my head. "Go on up to Evvie's room and nap. Just rest as long as you want."

Forever. I want to sleep forever. Wake up when I can make sense of everything. Is this what it's like to be fourteen for everyone? So confusing, this age of change. High school. The mean mess of my growing body, the growl in my shoulders and arms as they sprouted length and width. Girls. Trying to figure out what to do.

Dad wanted to make that part easy. No to Student Government—too much time. No to Spanish—not when there was Italian at the school. Yes to Community Service Club, but only if I did things with the VFW. And yes to football. There. Set. Done.

I hurled my weary body on Evvie's pink fluff of a bed and plummeted into sleep. Maybe I would wake up with answers. With something, a map, maybe. A map of the world, a map of _myself_.

Instead, I rolled out of sleep to the sound of so many voices. My family, racous and wild on the first floor of the house and on the lawn that looked down over the rock quarry lake of the swim club. Lakeside, here in Belknap—silent K, of course, the secret shibboleth of the locals. When the big swim meets happened here in the summer, strangers from other states would flood in and take all of the parking in the neighborhood, blocking driveways and mushing cars into too-small sports. _Which way to downtown from here? Belk-nap to downtown?_

And Lewis and Evvie and Hannah or whatever cousin was around would snicker inside ourselves and say with serious faces, _Not far. Just take the loop south to I-65 and head that way. _Towards Bowling Green. And when they would walk away, nodding in pleasure at our Southern Hosptality, we would explode into laughter and call the cops to ticket their SUVs until Mom or Aunt Cathy or Aunt Betsy would catch us, shooing us to do something productive.

"It is productive," I would protest. "We're generating revenue for the LPD."

"Smart ass," Mom would laugh, snagging an arm around my neck.

Why did we have to leave? Now, Louisville felt weird, different, too large somehow. It had grown since we had left. I had, too, just…not the same.

So noisy, under the floor. My grandparents had seven children, a good, solid Catholic brood. Lorenzo, Jr., Lucio, Luigi, Big Lloyd, Leonardo, Lyman, and Gina. And then _they_ all had kids, honoring my grandfather by giving their first child an "L" name, those families that began with daughters bestowing an "L" on their first sons, too. Junior had Loretta and Lorenzo the Third—Zo—and four more. Luc had Leah and the twins and Luciano and the other two. Lou's eldest son, Luca, and the four big boys that had played at Dunbar in Lexington. Big Lloyd had Little Lloyd who wasn't very little, and four daughters, my cousin Laurel the same age as Kerry, all of them running wild in Lexington, too. Leo's oldest was Lucy, then Lewis, and then Evangelina, Maria, and Hannah. And Gina had Lisa and Lance, three more, and then whatever sex was cooking in her stomach right now.

And then my father and my mother. Who only had three children.

Who had failed somehow.

At a certain age, we cousins got labeled. _The_. Loretta the Marine. Zo the pianist. Little Lloyd the baseball star. Laurel the cheerleader. Luca the freestyler, Hannah the butterflyer, Norah the breaststroker. Lewis the running back. Sam the linebacker.

Last summer, I sat on the wood raft in the center of the lake and glared at Luca as he explained all of this, the competition suit from his team at Western Kentucky low below his hipbones. "Well, what am I?" I demanded.

"Logan the annoying," Evvie cackled, leaning her arms over the side of the raft.

"OooRah," Lucy laughed, wringing out her hair.

I kicked my foot against the side. "No, guys, come on. What's my label?"

"You're Logan the Lyman, that's what you are," Luca said, raising an eyebrow at me before leaping into the dark green sink of the water, drenching me in its cold wake.

I glared at Lucy. "That's not fair."

"Well, you could be Logan the receiver, but then it's baseball season, and it's Logan the third baseman. Whatever, Lo, relax. You're too young to get the Bruno pigeonhole," she sighed.

"Laurel's ten!" I yelped.

"Whatever, Laurel came out of the womb in a Dunbar cheerleading outfit," Evvie snorted. "I'm Evvie the math genius. Actually, Lo, you're Logan the nerd. Baby-sitting the Banks' kids and doing the science fair," she snickered. "We just didn't want to tell you that to your face. 'Cause you're so pretty."

I watched her jump into the water and swim after her brother while I looked Lucy with a pleading look. "Logan the nerd?"

"Well, when you're a dentist or whatever, you can laugh your way to the bank, kiddo," she smiled. "Just be sure to do my cavities for free. 'Cause I hate flossing."

"It's the easiest way to keep your teeth happy," I scolded.

Lucy stared at me. "Kiddo. That's why you're The Nerd." She leaned back on the raft. "Suddenly, being The Lyman isn't so bad, huh?"

Was it?

I went downstairs and glanced down the line of the house. Uncle Leo was pulling out a case of beer from the refrigerator, his voice booming across the living room as he cursed out Tubby Smith for not landing some prized basketball recruit from down in the Cumberlands. I rolled my eyes at Susie and Daryl as I swung down the stairs, snaking through the folks in the room to make my way into the kitchen, to stand between him and my father, Lewis leaning against the oven with a bored look on his face.

"Ah, if it isn't the second best forward in the family," Leo announced, grabbing a bottle out of the box and waving it at me. He hooked the cap under the counter, making the aluminum of it crack back off of the glass. "Ready to get your ass kicked by Lew at UK?"

"Taking time from football, I say," Dad grumbled. "You don't see Chad Johnson or Rudi Johnson fucking around in the off season, do you? Nope, they're focused on job one—the season." He started shaking his head, but Lewis took a step between us.

"Come on, Ly," he wheedled, "I miss my cuz, we'll have a ton of fun. Moreso than I woudda had with Lloyd." We glanced into the living room at my hulk of a cousin, his leg shrouded in a thick cast. My dad smiled a little as Lewis added, "Think of it as cross-training. It'll help Lo with his footwork and quickness, right, Dad?"

"That's right—Lo's got speedy feet, learnin' the fast break'll really help him with his giddy-up against a defense," Leo added, punching my shoulder. "That, and I've seen your stats. Good hands—basketball will hone that. Seriously, Ly, this is all upside." His face took on an amused shade. "Besides, ain't like Logan's going anywhere with football after high school—look at him, he's got a swimmer's body." With his bottle, he traced the V of my torso down to my waist. "Got girl hips, all slim and pretty."

"Fuck you," I laughed, grabbing a soda out of the frige. But I felt a bubble of anger. From where? Where was it coming from, this red swell? From my father, who thought I was wasting my time?

From Lewis and Leo, thinking all I would do is learn a few tricks and nothing more?

I could be as good as Lewis. No. I could be better. He had always rested once he got good enough—not me. I was the bullheaded one. I was the stubborn one, the one who could never let go.

That's what Mary Anne had shouted at me. _You just never learn when to let go, do you, Logan?_

_I don't want to learn to let go of you_, I had yelled back. My pretty girl. I bit down on my lips—I had a new girlfriend now. Hot. Who wanted me. Dori, Dori, think of Dori. Think of her thin lips smacking hard against mine, the smush of her body on mine during the graduation dance, Kristy Thomas and the other BSC girls glaring at me as I let my tongue slip into Dori's mouth in front of them all. What did they want from me?

They didn't get to have anything on me anymore. I had quit the day after Mary Anne dumped me—again—saying I had had enough. It was over. Nobody got to tell me what to do, not Kristy Thomas.

And not my dad, still glaring hard at the floor and seeing my face. My obstinate, contrary face. All because I wanted to do something different than him.

The crimson bloom of anger swallowed back for a moment—and I felt relief. Why?

Leo was laughing at me, at the gumption of my profanity. "I forgot to thank you, Lo, for chickening out of Conant."

Dad's face smeared over with a black look of anger, and I rocked back on my heels. It was if he had punched me full on in the stomach. I licked my lips and asked, "Why?"

"'Cause they didn't much mind switching one Bruno for another—Dad paid Ly and Aunt L'rose the deposit, and I'm taking your spot," Lewis beamed. "Dude, ten percent of their grads go on to the service academies. I'll totally have a shot at West Point from there."

"First one from the whole goddamned family to make it to an Academy, how 'bout them apples?" Leo roared, chuffing Lewis on the shoulder. "Here that?" he yelled to the living room. "My boy's gonna be a West Point cadet, so hold onto yer panties over there in that desert, right? Lewis is gonna ate it up!"

"Whatever, Leo, Army boys are Marines who can't get their pants on without their mommy's help," Leah laughed. "Can I get a OooRah?"

Several of the men on the couches yelled back at her, and Dad leaned over the island to shout back, "Yeah, well, you just remember who made the charge up on Normandy, little girl." His finger pointed at her and then swung back on himself. "That's be the Rangers, friend."

Leah jumped up with Loretta chasing behind her. "Come on, this speaks to a little bit of patriotism set to song," Leah declared, dashing into the backyard.

"How much have you missed home," Lewis asked me, baring his teeth.

"Right?" I mumbled, closing my eyes. My skin felt too tight, too hot, stretching over my bones. Like I didn't belong inside of my body. I stared down my frame, to my legs. They had been aching so much lately—the warning rumble of a growth spurt. My father was six-two; I just wanted to be taller than him.

I wanted to look him in the eye when he said things to me. I was tired of always staring up at him.

Dad slapped a hand on my shoulder. "Well, Lo here still thinks he's gonna be like Rosie and do the dentist thing." He tipped his head back and snickered, "Always noticing people's smiles, like that sweet girl he chased off last month. Oh, but his new girl? Ain't got no smile. What she got is parents who let her outta the house looking like she gonna freeze to death in July, if you get my drift."

"Evvie tried to get outta the house in one of them crop top things, her belly hanging out like it was giving a show, and I told her to getcher ass back inside and into a real shirt," Leo barked, waving his beer in the air.

"Ker's always running around in her leotard—she's in a gymnastics phase," I said, sipping my drink.

Dad rolled his eyes. "That'll end soon. She's gonna get way too tall for all that shit. That girl friend of her, Becca? Been trying to get her to go to the pool, join the swim team." A wicked look flamed in his eye. "Maybe you and her can both join the girls' team, Lo."

I clenched my hand around the thin metal of the can and slid away from the sounds of the three of them laughing. At me. At Logan, that boy baby-sitter, the nerd, always so weird. Always so second place. To him, to all of the football and baseball trophies back at Mamaw and Papaw's in Elizabethtown, all of his medals and plaques. Every piece of hardware I brought home from now until graduation would be measured up against what he had won. He would always toss down that yardstick, wouldn't he.

I wanted to hit my father. Because I suddenly hated myself so much, I couldn't breathe. So I went outside.

The backyard was full of song, Toby Keith barreling out of the stereo speakers while my family waved their beers in the air, led by Leah up on the glider. The smoke on the grill was drifting through the crowd as everyone shouted along with the line, "We'll put a boot in yer ass, it's the American way!"

And I saw my mother, sitting in a lawn chair back by the garden, roll her eyes.

"I thought you liked Toby Keith," I said, walking up to her. "You're the big country fan, you and Dad."

Mom shrugged, resting her knitting in her lap. "Sure, I do. It's the rampant jingoism that I have difficulty with."

"What's that—jingoism?" I asked.

After sucking a bit of air through her teeth, Mom explained, "It's patriotism run amock. Like, patriotism on steroids. I find it to be a bit overwhelming. The Brunos, as you can tell, disagree."

"Of course they do," I grinned, sitting down on the stone bench. "I'm pretty sure we make up half of the armed forces by now."

Mom raised an eyebrow. "That's about right." She held the knitting needles together and swept over the rest of the family. "Look at them, Lo. It's actually incredible, the love that they have for this country. And it's not blind—Loretta was saying that Iraq is a bigger mess than they're telling us. She thinks we'll be there for a decade, maybe longer. That place is devolving into a civil war right before our eyes, and the only thing preventing complete chaos is thousands of American men and women trying to cobble order together, and that's not just despite the Iraq itself, but also despite the mismanagement of the war and the whole situation from Washington. And yet? Knowing that, your cousins, your sister, even—they still will go. Because they believe so much in America, they will go."

"I don't get it," I said, squinting at her. "How does believing in America mean that they'll go to Iraq or Afghanistan?"

"The Brunos believe that they owe something to America. Your great-grandfather was watching Italy devolve under fascism, and he didn't want his children to be oppressed like that. And he didn't want his kids to be crushing someone else's grapes their whole lives. Really, Logan, this family is the American dream," she explained, bouncing her needles at all of them again. "An illiterate winery worker's grandchildren all went to college. Your dad and his brothers and Aunt Gina, all of them went to college. Yes, Dad and Leo, Lloyd, and Gina enlisted first, but then they went to college. And Daddy got an MBA. And so they feel that the kind of opportunities you get in America creates an obligation."

I gave her a small poke on the leg. "You're kinda the American dream, too, Mom."

"I know," she smiled. "A girl from backwater Mississippi can go to medical school. I'm glad my dad came here to the States after his first wife died, I'm very glad. I'm sure if I had been born in Italy, I would have been anything that I wanted, but maybe I would have felt the pressure that Andria and Giada did, to not outshine their husbands. Your daddy is proud of me for being smart. Dad's never made me feel bad for being better educated than him." She shrugged. "I don't feel that same obligation to America, though, for my opportunities. No—I do, but not like the Brunos do."

I frowned at her. My head was beginning to spin, but I didn't want her to stop. My mother was speaking to me like I was her equal, her peer. Dad had grumbled this past year that I was becoming more and more like Mom, but I still didn't feel close to her. I could sit beside her and read on the back porch, on the couch, smell the lily-light wind of her perfume on her skin, have her long blonde hair drape on my shoulder. I could hug her close, kiss her on the cheek, but I never felt close to her. She was always watching me, watching us. It was as if she didn't want to interfere.

We had to find our own way.

And besides. Kerry was her favorite. Kerry, who looked like Mom: the same long, light gold hair, blue eyes, square chin, high bones in her cheeks. The three of us, we all looked the same. But Kerry looked like Mom and acted like Dad, and my mother showered her with something that I never got. I wasn't the only little girl, the _principesa_, the adored _Alladola_. I would see Mom in Kerry's room late at night, weaving the mass of my sister's hair into a long braid as Kerry read Judy Blume books out loud. No boys allowed.

How could I be my mother's son if I could never get close to her?

After our first month here, I had trouble sleeping—I had kissed Mary Anne for the first time, and I laid awake, staring up at the ceiling and replaying each second where my lips had landed on hers. On those large, soft things that bent up into that gorgeous smile. I was going to see her in seven hours—how was I supposed to sleep? And I heard it, drifting up the stairs in gasps.

The sound of my mother crying.

I bolted up, creeping to the door and nudging it open so I could skitter to the top of the stairs and listen. Was it one of their Loud Talks—did my father make her cry? But Dad hated making Mom upset, it was the surefire way that he wouldn't get his way, when Mom got sad. The only time I had ever seen her cry and him not change his tune in the next breath was when he said Slugger had transferred him to manage equiptment sales in New England. She had cried, and he still called the realator.

I held the air in my chest, listening. "And she said—she said, 'Oh, _Louise_ from _Louisville_, how precious!'" Mom sang out in a ragged voice. "So bitchy, and then the entire PTA laughed at me. As if I was just some hick, Ly."

"Well…you'll go by Rose from here on out, _cara mia_," Dad said, soothing and low, his heart folded inside out. "Just say that you, uh, you thought that since your niece Louise wasn't around that you could finally be just Louise and not, you know, L'Rose or Rose, just tell 'em that most folks call you Rose, and that should end it. And if not—make 'em call ya Dr. Rota, and shove it down their fat Yankee faces."

Mom let out a loud, wet sniff. "The nicest person I have met here is that Mary Anne—and she's thirteen, Ly! You should have seen me today, love, I was stalling Logan and her before their date because I was so desperate to talk to a nice person again."

"Well, why doncha go down 'round her folks, chat up her momma and dad. If they raised such a sweet girl, I bet they're good people, Rosie," Dad suggested.

Mom sighed. "Her momma's dead, Ly. Just her and her daddy."

"Then chat up her daddy—bring him somma that tiramisu. You had plenty of guy friends back home. Like Dougie. Oh, Dougie Weissman paahks his caah at the Haahvad yaahd, Dougie!" Dad exclaimed, and I could hear a thump. A pillow on a body.

"Oh, stop it," Mom laughed.

"Oh, _Dougie_!" Dad trilled again. "Seriously, _cara_, who names their kid 'Dougie?'"

"Who names their kid 'Hunt/'" Mom shot back. "It's a verb, Ly! A verb!"

I leaned back against the wall, listening to my mother laugh, to my parents kiss, to her laughing again and again. When was the last time that she laughed that hard, that long? A month ago. Who had made her laugh? Was it me?

Was that important? I surprised myself as I thought, _Yes_.

A year later, my mother had just as many friends as she did that night, but she had let herself be swallowed up in books instead, growing inside of herself and not out. Shutting me out. Let me in, Mom. Don't leave me alone with him. To _be_ him.

I took a breath and looked back at the rest of the family in the yard—the song had ended, and they were talking again, their voices so loud, the tangled tongues of the South. I had missed this, the way we sounded. I missed home so much—not Louisville, but the South. The way we are here, relaxed and slow, taking our time. I had to admit—one of the things I hated about the idea of Conant Academy was how far north it was. New Hampshire, the heart of Yankee territory. I couldn't do that.

I wanted to go home. I just wasn't sure where that was. Maybe inside of me. Home, home, I want to find my home. Take me. But who? Me, maybe. Maybe I had to find my own way.

Maybe this why Mom hung back so much. So I could find that myself.

"How are you obligated to America, Mom?" I asked, glancing at her.

She tapped her needles against her legs. "I think…well, you do have so many opportunities here to rise from your life into something greater. There is definitely a classist argument to be made that for a lot of people in poverty that the best way out is through the military—risk your life for four years, get a free ride to college. Is that a fair trade, to ask the people most in need of help to maximize their potential to sacrifice the most? Or, does the military provide those people with the skills that they need to rise from that depressed social status? Does that make sense to you?"

"Yes," I said, nodding. Kind of. I'd need to read a book on that. Classist. Racist, probably. I hadn't thought about that. My head started spinning again.

"At any rate, I feel that Americans all have an obligation to the country, but it's not a military one—this is where I disagree with your father, and I want you to know, if you want to be a dentist and not serve at all? I will support you, completely. See, I think—if you have a country where there is opportunity all around you, your obligation is to maximize your potential, Logan. To take all of the gifts that the Lord put inside of you and not let them go to waste," Mom stated, putting her hand on my face.

I leaned into the soft feel of her palm, the thick smell of honey and peppers on her fingers drifting into my nose. "What are my gifts, Mom?" I whispered.

Her fingers dug hard into my cheek. "God has given you strength of heart and of body. You're at a turning point in your life, _rondine_. There was a famous acting teacher who told all of his students, You are pure potential. That's what you are." She narrowed her eyes and dropped her hand down to take all of my fingers in her clenched fist. "I've had your coaches tell me for years that you could be great. I've had teachers of yours tell me for years that you are so bright. You need to understand this, Logan. Your daddy wanted to send you to Conant because _he_ went there, and he don't see you two as different people."

"We are," I snapped. "I am not Dad."

"I know," Mom said, her tone soothing. She held tight to me and admitted, "I went along with Dad because I thought—maybe there, you'd finally uncork whatever it is inside of you that you haven't touched yet. But, Logan, I feel that when you're ready to make your move, to take control of your life, you will. I think you will do things so great, you'll take my breath away." Her eyes swam into mine. "In fact, I'm counting on it."

Mom's hands reached up into my hair, and she kissed my forehead, her fingers pinching the ends of my hair as if it were bluegrass, the first purpled blades of the year that you touch just to remember that there is something special there. This is nothing ordinary, the way this grass can make the ground look like the sea.

Her hands touched my hair, and I wanted to cry.

"Okay, well, I'm a-gonna grab me another beer and be a bit social. Or else your Aunt Cathy'll start her jawing about how I'm just too much of a bookworm," Mom grumbled, winking at me as she slipped away and into the crowd, leaving her knitting behind. Me behind. She had thicked me over with all of her words, this promise of myself, and then expected me to make sense of it all.

How? Who was I supposed to be—gifts? Weaknesses. My big heart. If it was so strong, then why was it still aching over Mary Anne? I had Dori now, why was I still clutching at my heart like it was a bruised and lorn thing? Strong of body. Had I ever lived up to my potential in any of my sports? Maybe track. I worked so hard to make that team—

And Dad had been proud for ten minutes. And then he became annoyed. Because track and baseball overlapped. Because baseball was _our thing_, he had pressed, pointing at the logo on his shirt, at the cursive stitch that declared _Louisville Slugger_. _I don't want you losing focus_.

If you put a gun to my head, if you held a metal thing that would take my life away and say, Pick only one sport out of the three you played this past year, what would I choose?

I took what felt like my last breath and thought, Track. Why. Because I picked that. Football, baseball: Dad put me in those. Dad pushed me in those. Dad, Dad, his hands were all over me, stamped over all of my choices. I didn't necessarily love track—it grew boring, just the running. It lacked the challenge that football had, that baseball had. Break things down, outsmart everyone else. Track was just run, run, run, done. But it was _mine_. Not his.

Football and baseball were his. I stared ahead at my family and found him. And I looked down at myself, at the long ribbon of my legs. I would grow tall, the doctor had said it at my last checkup, that I was going to be a beanpole. When I told Dad, he had clapped his hands.

_Excellent! Makes for a great receiver and cornerback. My old positions, too_, he had beamed, stretching himself full up to his height, towering over me. _Maybe you'll be as good as your old man._ And then he laughed. Because it was funny. The idea that I could be as good as him.

I bit down and caught the tip of my tongue in my teeth. Blood ran out of it, coating my mouth with a metal taste that made me stiffen and grow cold. It was funny. It was funny. That I would grow up in his shadow. And stay there.

He had it all planned for me, didn't he, me, living in the darkness of his life.

Who do you want to be, Logan?

Who I am going to be?

It stabbed at me, right in me, striking so hard that it ripped out my breath. Ripped it, stripped it like flesh from bone. I didn't know who I wanted to be, but I knew, I _knew_ like I knew my own name what I didn't want to be. Who I didn't want to be.

I stared straight ahead at him, and the thought raced over my tongue in a hot streak, and I said, so low it was deeper than the ocean, "I don't want to be my father."


	21. Chapter 18: Mary Anne

"Sunscreen, May," Emily reminded me, putting the bottle in my hand. Her face was colored in concern as I took a deep breath and rubbed my exposed skin with the white cream. As I set the bottle down, she handed me a palm full of pills. Six vitamins and that one large white pill. The most important pill.

I took three large gulps of juice and washed them all down.

"Do you want fruit? A pepper?" Emily suggested, scratching her left leg with her right foot, poking around a basket on the counter. She padded around in her bare feet, the orange of her bikini showing off her bronzed skin. College had been kind to her, giving her body the soft curves that begged for hands to find, to feel and hold and strum into motion. That face, the face that always seemed ready to smirk with a secret, was calm and steady. The way she looked when she had to work.

When she was facing down a problem.

Could you solve me, Emily? Can you research this, can you pick it apart?

Her hand put a pepper in mine. "Come on, Maybelle," she urged. "You can rest on the beach, the sunlight is good for you. Ups that serotonin." Her arm looped with mine, and we headed out the back of the condo towards the beach where Jeremy was reading a book, his eyes following Stacey, Miranda, and Erin bouncing in the ocean.

"Hey, you got her up," he grinned, putting down the novel. He gestured to a large beach towel under the umbrella. "You can lay out here, May, okay?" I nodded, splaying down next to him. Emily spread a light beach wrap over my body, and I felt myself slipping back into sleep.

But I heard her whisper to him, "I thought this was over. She's back on her meds, Jeremy, why isn't she better yet?"

"It can take a week or two to kick in. Just be patient," he murmured, and his hand ran over my shoulders, as if he was wiping off rain.

When I woke, everyone was sitting around on towels, making their way through a large pile of fried chicken. I rubbed at my eyes and mumbled, "What time is it?"

"One-thirty," Erin answered, looking at her watch. "You've been out for over three hours, babe. Feeling better?"

I slumped my shoulders down. Miranda handed me a piece of chicken. "Jeremy made it," she smiled. "It's fantabulous—and there's, like, potatoes and coleslaw and corn and everything. It's so Southern, I love it."

"No, no, Southern is barbeque—actually, Logan makes the best damn barbeque sauce," Erin said, licking her fingers. "That's so your dinner Sunday night. Hell, that's _my_ dinner Sunday night. I'm inviting myself over." She bounced the chicken in the air like a baton.

Stacey laughed, swallowing a bite of potatoes with her hand hiding her mouth. "Our house is totally, like, the home for the wayward. Everybody's welcome, everybody gets to cram in. I'm thinking of snagging strangers from off the street—we got room in the dining room! Hell, crash on the hammock, how many more!"

"Poor May—not how you thought your first months of marriage would go, huh? Sharing the honeymoon with half of flippin' Stoneybrook," Miranda giggled, poking my ankle.

It was too close to the truth. I began to cry, leaning into Emily and weeping into her thin blonde hair. There was a scramble of bodies, and Miranda's arms pulled me into her embrace. "May, honey, what's wrong?"

"I don't know," I sniffed. No. _No_. I was not going to slip down. What do I do: come on, Mary Anne, _think_. Be the smart, smart girl. What do you do when you're sinking?

Get up.

"I need to move," I breathed. "Can someone help me? I want to go on a walk."

Stacey jumped to her feet. "Me and Jer will go with you. We've totally bonded—mathletes!" she crowed, and they exchanged a high five. The two of them helped me to my feet, and I put my arms around their waists as I clunked down the sand to the water's edge, trying to get my footing in the sand, cold from the lapping of the ocean.

We walked in silence for a while until I prodded them to talk. I wanted noise. Not the silence of my head, the steel-plate of this sickness. They chatted over me about math, about Jeremy's boyfriend, Aaron, about Stacey's duties as a Dollie. "Not just a dance team," she declared. "I _am_ Stanford."

"So, Stanford is girls in short skirts, dancing provocatively, with white gloves?" Jeremy laughed. "Glad I turned them down."

"Where else did you get in?" Stacey asked. "I got into NYU, USC, and Berkeley, but I always knew I wanted Stanford. Dawnie and I decided we really wanted to go to California together, and I had my fingers crossed so damn tight that she would get into a San Fran school because I was so hot for the Farm. Dude, my freshman year, I interned with the SSE—sorry, um Stanford Student Enterprises? We run, like, a real business, a real Store, like a bookstore? And this year, I get to work with the Capital Group, and we do banking and investing and stuff—I mean, I can't imagine going anywhere else, Jeremy."

Jeremy grinned at her and squinted his eyes in thought. "Um. Cornell, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Florida State. My mom works there as a secretary, so I kinda felt like I had to," he shrugged. "Duke gave me a lot of need-based money, and it was close to home. I decided at the last minute, though—I could be in the tundra of northern New York State if I hadn't read that Duke's totally gay friendly," he grinned, squeezing my hip.

I tilted my head against his shoulder. "I could be in Austin right now. Didn't I almost say yes to Texas, Stace?"

"You should have seen her," Stacey cackled. "May's been obsessed with Duke for years, but she got full rides chucked at her? And there was this huge drama when Duke only gave her a partial—guess they aren't as big of suckers for the sob story, huh?"

Jeremy snorted. "Oh, I know. All she has to do is sneeze _cancer survivor_, and everyone falls prostrate at her feet. It's just lame. You are lame!" he grit, shaking his finger at me. "You did it on purpose, getting cancer, to garner sympathy. Admit it."

"I did," I said, a smile spreading on my face. "And look at me now—I got a guy out of it, I got a school and money and everything. Cancer—it's the golden ticket."

"Can I ask you something that's going to come out really forward?" Stacey asked me, scuffing her feet in the sand. I nodded, staring at her. "Why haven't you gotten implants?"

I sighed. "I can feel—in my left breast, my nerve healed, so I can feel…well, yeah," I blushed. "That means more to me than having a normal chest. Though it doesn't mean that I don't get down about it sometimes. Most people don't notice—I mean, some girls are just flat chested. But I've heard comments."

"Whatever. Boobs are overrated," Jeremy sniffed. "Personally, I find them boring."

Stacey and I stared at him for a moment before breaking into laughter. "So that's why you're gay," I managed, holding myself up by clutching her arm.

"And now you know why I was drawn to you," he said, wiggling his eyebrows. He kissed my cheek. "Best day of freshman year. Well, until I met Aaron. Meeting you, and then meeting _your_ Erin. The Erry to my Jerry. We're totally _Three's Company_—that's what we did for Halloween last year. I was Jack, May was Janet, and Erin was Chrissy. She even dyed her hair blonde, tube socks and everything. It was awesome."

With a snicker, Stacey admitted, "I wore a pinstripe pants suit with a tie and everything, slicked back my hair? Carried a cigar and called it 'Penis Envy.' I was a hit."

"Oh, my God, that's so Season One _Project Runway_!" Jeremy screamed, dropping his arm from my waist to bounce with her in the sand.

I blinked. Okay. I reached down to the ground and plucked a piece of brown glass, the size of my thumbprint, smooth and almost dull, dusted over from the erosion of the water. What had it been before? A beer bottle, maybe? Can you know these kinds of things?

I sighed, pressing the glass hard in my palm. I ran my fingers in the string sides of my bikini—the spring break trip to the Virgin Islands, I wore this, Barbara and I running into the clear water, water the color of my lover's eyes. I wore his watch all week, setting a timer for thirty minutes to reapply sunscreen, and after the first two days, my skin was beginning to brown, the color of my radiation therapy. The color my chest was turning now.

Stacey stopped and tilted her face up to the sun, adjusting her huge sunglasses. "Do you think Cinderella really lived happily ever after? I had this dream last night that she got to the castle, and she and Prince Charming were finally able to talk, and she realized that he was a bit of an ass, and he thought she was boring, and then they were like, Shit! What do you think?"

Pushing out his lower lip, Jeremy said, "Well, they were totally love at first sight, right? I'd hope that ol' Cindy and the Prince's visceral connection belied a greater connection that was translated through that first physical reaction."

I nodded. "It's pheromones—scientists believe that love at first sight is actually a chemical compatibility, that is, your body and the body of your instant love are on this really fundamental level connected. Almost like you're made for each other. If you have that kind of elemental bond with someone else, the hope is, your desire for the other person can allow you the strength to adjust your personalities into alignment."

"Wow," Stacey snorted. "I just fell into the Kingdom of the Nerds, didn't I?"

"You're lucky Erin isn't here," Jeremy laughed.

She shrugged, kicking at the sand. "I don't know, I just have this feeling. I want Cinderella to be happy since she had just a shitty time of it, but she probably has no backbone, so she'd just do anything for Prince Charming. Him being a dick is just her cross to bear. And now she's married to him, and I bet Happily Ever After Land lacks a divorce court, so what's she gonna do?"

"Find Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, form a feminist book club, and start a revolution," Jeremy declared, thrusting his fist in the air. "I've always been bugged by the fact that those girls needed to be rescued by the men, but the feminist interpretation is that these women rescued the men right back—they were searching for something, and in these girls that were facing adversity yet keeping a sense of self, they found their true loves. Instead of thinking of Cinderella as waking up with a man she doesn't know, it's that he's picked her because of a strength that she has internally that he manifested physically."

I grinned at Stacey as he took my hand. "We took a lit class together last semester, and it was about folk tales—we read _Wicked_, went to see the musical down in Atlanta, and we talked a lot about subverting the paradigm. How to defy gravity, as it were," I added, squeezing his hand.

"May's our own Elphaba—'As someone told me lately, everyone deserves a chance to fly.' And nobody, in all of Connecticut or Duke, no father or sickness that there is or was, is ever gonna bring her down," he said, ringing a finger over my chin.

"I love _Wicked_!" Stacey gasped, clapping her hands. "'Popular' is my fucking theme song, are you kidding me? 'That's what makes me so nice! Whenever someone needs a makeover, I simply have to take over, I know, I _know_, exactly what they need.'" She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair. "I still think Cinderella's screwed," Stacey stated. Then a smile slicked over her face. "I think May makes a great wicked witch. She's got a hidden bitch streak that's quite impressive."

"Oh, what, the passive-aggressive dance when she's mad at you?" he snickered.

I put my hands on my hips and glared at both of them. "I'm much better at overt bitchery now. When I'm angry, I say it."

"'Jerry,'" he whined in a high-voiced sigh. "'I _guess_ we could go shopping. If that's what you want. If you _really_ think that it's okay to not do our homework, to risk losing our scholarships and getting kicked out and ruining my life and everything, but if you _really_ want to, I'll go. No, no, I'm not mad, why would you think I'm mad?' Followed by complete silence at the mall as she lets out large heaves of breath as I try on more jeans. 'No, I'm _fine_. I'm happy that you're doing what _you_ want, Jerry.'"

I grabbed his arm and pulled him into the water, splashing kicks of water at his body as I hurled him into the insistent surf. "You are such an ass! That was once!"

"Drama queen!" he yelled, yanking me down next to him and covering me in the bitter salt of the ocean as he splashed me back.

"Smart aleck," I shot back, dumping an armful of water on his head.

"Nerd," he laughed, grabbing a handful of sand and stuffing it down the back of my tube top, the glop of it sliding down the saran wrap Emily and I had layered on my skin to keep my catheter dry.

I slapped sand on his face. "Nerd? Look in the mirror much, mister?"

"Tar Heel lover," he shouted, splashing me again.

"Whoa, that's low!" Stacey called as I gasped, jumping on top of him and pounding his shoulders with light punches. When I was too tired from screaming with giggles to fight him anymore, I rested my head against his chest, bony and hollowed where Logan was solid. Jeremy reminded me physically of the boy I dated for most of high school, Pete, with his skinny frame and flop of messy hair. I had noticed that first when he sat down next to me in my first psych class—a familiarity surrounded him. Maybe his passion for the subject, like my own. Maybe his dry sense of humor, like Emily. Or maybe it was a strange twist on that love at first sight—you remind me of someone who was once special. Who once made me feel special.

Who ended up not being enough. Though Jeremy was.

He was not Barbara, though. I had emailed her at the end of that first week: _I have met some great people, I'm so relieved! Though, none of them are you, so no worries._ I punctuated that with a smile, and when she replied, coping that sentence, all she had put in response was another smile with two exclamation points.

Amelia had died, and I had come into Barbara's life. Amelia had led us together, Barbara believed. Amelia wanted Barbara to move on, to find someone new.

Barbara had died, and it had been so long now. When would she lead me? I had played a game during freshman year, one that Logan said was unfair—the If You Were game, he called it. If You Were a little more like this, then you could be Barbara to me. That one person who I'd connect to with the ease of a puzzle piece. If Erin were a little less insecure about herself, making me live in a constant state of reassuring her or soothing her, then she'd be Barbara. If Jeremy were a girl, someone who I could invite over for a night of silly frilly things that unlock secrets, stories told about ourselves over wet nails or the braiding of hair in the middle of the night, then he would be Barbara.

"Maybe there isn't just one person, Tess," Logan would say. "You have so many great people in your life, maybe that's the point. You have different people to turn to for what you need. I mean, no offense, Babs," he would add, looking up at the ceiling, "but she wasn't exactly A Beautiful Mind, you know? When you wanted to talk about, like, school-y stuff, you'd go to Emmy or me."

"Yeah, but Barbara would listen to me if I wanted to rattle on about something that'd I read or whatever," I'd protest. "If I wanted to discuss something, then yeah, I'd call you or Em. But if I just had to tell _someone_ that I had, oh, read a really neat article on the frontal lobe development of teenagers and how that leads to the importance of their dreams, she'd listen to me. And if she wanted to prattle on about how George Clooney should be The Sexiest Man in America for the rest of his life, like, retire him from _People_'s annual thing because he is inherently that guy? I'd listen to that, even when it was like, Are we really talking about this for an hour? Because I just wanted to talk with her, angel. I just wanted to hear the sound of her voice."

I miss the sound of her voice.

I closed my eyes. She'd be twenty-one today.

"Hey," Stacey murmured, offering me her hand as I unwound myself from Jeremy. "Where did you just go? In this last moment, I could see you fuzz out. Where did you go in your head?"

"To Babsie," I admitted. "I've really been missing her lately."

"Well, of course," Stacey replied, brushing the sand off of my back. "Of course you'd want your best friend. If I had to go through something this hard without Dawn, I think I'd go nuts. We're all trying, though. Not to _be_ Babs, but to be enough."

My hand froze on her shoulder. "Do you get enough, Stacey? I mean, you say you have friends at Stan—uh, the Farm," I corrected, grinning as she winked at me. "Are they enough?"

"You mean, do I put too much in Dawn?" Stacey asked, raising her eyebrow. Jeremy washed the last of the sand from his body and joined us as we walked back to our beach. "I bet I do. I haven't told a single person about the rape at SU. Not Kaia, not Skylar, not Marilynda. It's not that I don't trust them? It's just—something like that changes you in their eyes. I mean, how much do you have to trust someone to tell them you had cancer?"

I screwed up my mouth and looked back at Jeremy. He took a breath and shrugged. "May's pretty good about the cancer thing—she and I belong to a service frat, and she's really open about being a survivor, and she coordinates the breast cancer fundraiser in October and the cancer run in the spring. And, I mean, she gets scholarship money from cancer organizations, and she talks about that, too. But, I think Stacey's right. You don't tell people what cancer you had unless you get _really_ tight with them. What May says is that it was soft tissue and lymphatic cancer if people ask what kind."

"It's the truth," I insisted. "Just…not the exact truth." I looked at her—into her, into those eyes that had once been so distant but were now open, clear. Welcoming. "It _does_ change people. To quote ol' _Wicked_ again, 'If I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free.' The more people who know the dirty truth, the harder it is to rise above it. But Stace," I said, taking a breath. "I've told people. Erin, Jer, three of my really good girl friends from the dorm—I've told them. It's who I am, I'm a breast cancer survivor. Just like you are a survivor, too."

"It was scary to hear," Jeremy said, his shoulder twitching. "But, you think, this person that I really love is this girl because of where she came from and what's happened to her. It makes you appreciate your friend more after the shock wears off. Honestly."

Staecy's head bobbed as she scuffed against the sand. "Maybe."

"I saw Mary Anne's chest—once," Jeremy continued. "She found a lump towards the end of the semester last year. I mean, it ended up being benign, but…God, that was terrifying—she pounded on my door at one in the morning, just in hysterics. And I had never seen Logan at our dorm before, ever since the beer bottle incident, but he was there because he had felt it? And she dragged me to her room and begged me to see if I could feel it, too. Erin went to get Marissa and Jenny, and May took off her shirt, and I have never felt so little in my life. And my dad called me the most evil things when I came out to him, but I got through it because I knew, I _knew_ that I was okay under my skin with who I was. Call me a faggot, whatever, Dad, I am who I am."

"Your father said that to you?" Stacey whispered, stopping and staring at him with her mouth open. "Oh, my God, I'm so sorry."

Jeremy waved his hand at her. "Hey, like I said, it wasn't easy, but I couldn't live a lie to him anymore. I couldn't. I had to be me."

"When I told my dad I was raped, he threw a lamp at the wall. My mother cried so hard, she started choking, but my dad—he wanted to kill the guy, and he couldn't, so he killed a lamp," Stacey said, letting out a cough of a laugh. "And I felt so helpless. It was like being raped all over again, you just have nothing. You just have to take it, take all of the pain." She licked her lips and glanced at me. "When you show people—what is it like?"

"Erin saw when I was changing—dorm rooms are tiny things, y'all," I noted with a weak smile. "And she didn't care at all. Her aunt had breast cancer, she was the best person to see first. I don't really remember much of that night, to be honest, Jeremy," I said, looking at him. "After Logan said he felt something, it all becomes a blur."

He shook his head. "You were just devastated. And—Stacey, you're right. You feel so damned helpless. I mean, here I'm staring at my best friend, and she looks like one of those Iraqi war veterans who got shredded by shrapnel, and she's begging me to tell her that I don't feel anything when I do. All we could do was stay with her that night. Me and Marissa and Jenny crashed on the floor, but I couldn't sleep. I think May cried all night, and I could hear Logan singing to her the whole time." He looked at Stacey and gave her a gaze that made her mouth buckle. "Maybe that's how it is with you and Dawn. I mean, Logan was the only one that really got it. He wasn't scared. Neither is Dawn."

"But—when you give other people time, they aren't scared, either. I remember feeling better because there were other people who knew. And in the morning, when Logan took me to the hospital, they all hugged me, and I felt so loved? Stacey, it's worth the risk," I murmured, staring at Erin as we grew closer to our friends. "If some people look at your different, they weren't meant to be yours. Don't be scared, Stace. Besides." I let my fingers slip in with hers. "You'll still have us."

Jeremy grinned at her. "I'm not freaked at all by it, Stace. I think you're one cool chick. Mathlete!"

She pounded her fist against his. "Forever, fellow math enthusiast!" She gathered me in her arms. "Thanks, May. If I call my friend Skylar this week, would you be there? I mean, with Dawn, of course, but I'd like it if you were there, too."

"Of course," I said, ruddering my fingers up her spine. "I hope you know—you were a wonderful friend to me back during the breast cancer. You were. A little dictatorial with the whole room decorating, but, you know, you were never scared to be there with me."

She winked, tugging at my hair. "The sister of my best friend is my sister." She strode off of the wet strip of sand that the ocean touched and skipped into the soft dry stretch of yellow beach up to our umbrella. "Tell me that there is still tons of chicken."

"Hello, I made enough for an army," Jeremy scoffed. "What have you three been up to?"

Emily tucked her wet hair into a ponytail. "More body surfing. Miranda lost her top. It was hot."

"My milkshakes do bring all the boys to the yard," Miranda grinned, taking a sip of her beer.

"Then it was like a freakin' Dairy Queen out there," Erin laughed. "The guys in the condo next to ours were really appreciative." Jeremy rolled his eyes, grabbing his cell phone and heading a few steps away. Erin made kissing noises at him; she took a bite of potato salad and looked at me. "How was the walk?"

I grinned. "Great! Getting up and moving really helped. Oh, and we decided that Stacey is totally Galinda the Makeover Witch."

Miranda raised her eyebrows as she swigged the last of her beer, pitching the empty bottle aside. She grabbed another Corona and twisted it open; as she jammed a lime in the neck and pressed the open mouth while turning the bottle open, she said to Stacey, "Remember when you said that we were like _The Wizard of Oz_? May was Dorothy, always looking for a home, Emmy was the Cowardly Lion because of the whole asshattery around her and Navit, I was…oh, shit, hold on. Babsie was the Scarecrow because she was always thinking with her heart, and I needed a heart because, like, I threatened people too much. Which is bullshit, I'm sorry, some people just deserve to get their asses kicked."

"And I'm Glinda, goddess of fashion," Stacey giggled, "and Dawn would be..."

"The Munchkins. The Lollipop Guild? Hello, it's a union. Dawn was so their Norma Rae," Emily laughed. "If the house hadn't crashed on the Wicked Witch of the East—who, I'm sure was Kristy Thomas, that bossy-ass—Dawn would have led a revolt for the proletariat in due time."

Stacey slapped my shoulder. "And Claudia's the Wicked Witch of the West! Or Cokie, I'm willing to negotiate. And the rest of their little buddies are the flying monkeys."

"And Logan's the guy hiding behind the curtain, and Abby Stevenson would be the great big loud head trying to distract everyone," I supplied, bouncing a bit.

Stacey pulled an iced tea out of the cooler. "Of the original BSC, I think…I was Dorothy, searching for a place to belong after, like, fleeing NYC. You would have been the Cowardly Lion, Claudia was the Scarecrow, and Kristy was the tin man." She grinned, popping off the top. "Dawn is still the Munchkins."

"Then who are Jessi and Mal?" I snickered. I slapped my hand over my mouth. "Oh, that was mean, I'm sorry!"

Emily shook her head at us. "I've said it before, and I will say it again. The BSC was so weird. Culty. It went from a neat idea to a cult. The rest of us just thought you guys were weird. I mean, you didn't do anything in eighth grade that wasn't the club."

"I tried," Stacey protested. "I tried to be a cheerleader, but they bitched me out. To their folly, for now I'm a Dollie!" she crowed, clinking her bottle with Miranda's beer.

Emily shrugged. "Babsie and Amelia and I would sometimes be like, They're insane. I totally admit to getting way to into the news stuff, absolutely, but I also did German Club and JCC stuff with Temple. It might not have seemed that way, but I did have a life outside of the newspaper. You guys _were_ your club. If it wasn't for their group project, Babs wouldn't have gotten to know May at all."

"You guys totally ditched me," Miranda grumbled. "You and Kristy. Ry and I were so pissed, it was like, Oh, so we're not good enough now? Because we're not wild about kids?"

"I've apologized so many times," I protested, but Miranda waved a hand at me.

"Oh, relax. And I've told you a billion times, I blame Kristy. You were so her minion." She and Emily stuck out their arms and rolled their eyes back in their head. They started groaning, "Zombie Mary Anne, aaahhh."

"Stop it," I snapped, flicking sand at their legs. "Honestly."

Erin tightened the knot on her beach wrap. "I just think it's so funny that you guys had a baby-sitting club. I'm sorry, but I hated sharing my clients. I totally wanted their money, I didn't want to share with anyone."

Stacey grumbled, "We _so_ undercharged. We put every other baby-sitter in town out of business. It was pretty evil of us. Though, I mean, why weren't we getting combat for some of our clients? Hellions, unbalanced hellions."

Laughing, Erin took a few steps out from under the umbrella, a beer in hand as she spread out a towel in the hard eye of the sun. "Sorry, guys, but what I always wanted was a sleepover club. Totally. I loved those books."

"Me, too!" Miranda gasped, and I smiled as the two of them gushed over those books, over the _Saddle Club_ series and _Sweet Valley High_. Emily rolled her eyes, pulling out a book of her own. Stacey reached into her tote and slipped on a Marquette shirt.

I raised my eyebrows at her, and she glared at me. "Not a single word," she warned.

"Hey, I respect the awesomeness of the Golden Eagles—I wear a signed Davis Dial sweatshirt around campus like the proudest sister-in-law in the world. That's what Dave started calling me last year," I grinned.

"I'm really glad that they are still so close," Stacey nodded, tugging at the hem. "A successful long distance relationship, as it were."

"Oh, Stace, you have no idea," I snickered. "During the season? They send each other gifts, like cookies and balloons, lots of balloons. 'Cause of—"

"Seashells and balloons, I know," Stacey said with a shy smile. "I used to joke that Davis was breaking the first commandment with his false idolatry of Al McGuire. And he got all serious and said, 'Anastacia, he's no false idol. The man is a god.' When Marquette upset Duke, you know, back in fall of '06? The asskicking to end all asskickings?"

"Shut up," I snapped. "It's been three years, I'm still trying to recover from the _massive_ mocking voicemail he left me that night."

Stacey cackled a bit. "Yeah, that was funny to see you go purple the next morning, ah, good times. Anyway, he called me and was screaming and crying and just hollering, 'Seashells and balloons, Anastacia, it's better than anything I've ever felt in the world!'" And her breath snagged in her mouth, and her face bottled up a deep look of sadness. "'Next to loving you.'"

I reached out my hand to her, but Stacey shook her head so quick that her hair tumbled down out of its clip. "Please, May, I don't want to talk about him. Or it. Please."

_Stacey, I know your secret_, I wanted to exclaim. I know, I know. That you put your heart out for who you thought would care for it. I know how you were hurt. Stacey, I'm here for you. Stacey, tell me yourself.

Stacey, why are you punishing yourself. Why do you still push people away.

That missing hour from her life. Stacey, I know what it's like to die and come back. To lose yourself and then resurface.

And I knew, I knew what Stacey was so scared of. I knew what I _should_ have said to Dawn Thursday night when she asked me how you know you're in love. Love is surrendering yourself to someone else, trusting them with all of the vulnerable places of yourself—your heart. Your soul. Your self. That night in Durham when Logan moved his markers over my body, blanketing me in stars, I put myself in his hands. I trusted him with me, and I was given back a Mary Anne that took my breath away, a Mary Anne that shone through all of the fear, all of the uncertainty, that beamed through it all. I turned myself over to him, and he gave _me_ back, plus a girl that I had yet to meet. A girl that I loved, too.

Love is a loss of control. Love is trust. Love is something terrifying to someone who has had piece of herself ripped away without any choice, any say. The time that man raped Stacey, the time she spent waiting on a disease test—that was her life taken away, giving it over to someone else and getting back a Stacey she didn't want.

I sealed my lips together and tucked all of that into my heart. I could wait to tell her. When she was ready, I would tell her. The night I died, Stacey had stood there with my sister and declared her faith that I would live. I had the same faith in her, I did. And I would help bring Stacey all the way back.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The candles on the cake were nearing their end, the wicks so close to drowning in the wax. We would wait. That was the rule—no one blew them out. They either extinguished on their own or burned themselves to their own death.

Because she was not here to blow them out herself.

Erin wiped her mouth on her napkin. "Barbara, I am glad your favorite foods are so damned delicious," she grinned, looking up at the starred over sky. "You have great taste—ha! Get it? Taste?"

"Boo," Miranda giggled, swatting at her. "That was a bad pun."

Erin shrugged, and I tossed a chunk of chicken at her. "Just stick to waxing intellectual, babe. It's your strength," I nodded.

"Fine. Then I'm sorry that all y'all lack the cerebral synapses to appreciate my forays into the realm of comedy and base humor," Erin sniffed. "That better?"

Emily grit her teeth, her fork full of fried rice suspended in front of her mouth. "That's pretentious as fuck, dude."

"Welcome to my world," Jeremy sighed.

"Whatever, you're just as bad!" Erin squawked, and the two of them shoved each other as they chattered with laughter.

The last candle swallowed its flame, pluming smoke all over the table. Emily held up a knife and waved it in the air. "Okay. So what happens now is, we cut the cake, and before we can eat, everyone has to share their favorite memory of Babs." She glanced at Jeremy and Erin as she pressed the knife through the thick frosting, revealing the chocolate cake. "I know you guys didn't know her, it's fine."

"No, I have a Barbara story," Erin said, holding up her index finger. "It was the first time Babs called where I answered the phone. May was in the shower, and so I said, Oh, do you want me to have her call you back, and she said, Nah, let's give her a moment or two to see if she shows, and so we chitchatted for maybe thirty seconds before May came back in with her shower basket, and she had a towel wrapped around her body? And I said, It's Babs, and May grabbed the phone and started jumping up and down, and the towel fell off—so she lets out the loudest scream, drops the phone, and tries to recover herself up. And she's screamed so loud that the RA came running, bursting open the door just as May's gotten the towel back on—and then May screamed again, and I could hear Babs yelling, What's going on! Are you okay! After we cleared up all of the confusion, May sat down and told Barbara everything, and Babs starts hollering, 'I got you naked! I got you naked!' Oh, my God, I hadn't seen Mary Anne laugh that hard, so hard that she was crossing her legs so she wouldn't wet herself."

Miranda slipped off of her chair and balled her body up under the table. I could hear the gasps of her laughter. "Oh, _shut up_, that's fantastic!"

With a pout, Emily handed me a piece of cake. "I thought I was the only girl who could get you naked."

"Stop it," I teased, sticking out my tongue at her. She bit into her grin and wrinkled her nose, giving a plate with a sliver of cake to Stacey.

Jeremy took a breath. "Mine is, first time I came to May and Erin's room, Mary Anne was taking down all of her photos and telling me about her personal life. Like, this is my sister Dawn and her best friend Stacey—hello, lady," he said, nudging her side. Stacey smiled as he continued, "This is my dad and stepmom, this my Logan, and these are my best friends. So, she tells me about you two," he said, waving his fork at Miranda and Emily, "and then she goes, And this! Is my Babsie. And so I'm staring at this photo of a sweet girl with the adorable little red spiral curls down to her shoulders, the big eyes, the big smile, the white sundress, just so cutesy. A total _Babsie_."

He raised his eyebrows at me. "And then Mary Anne chirps, and I quote, 'Babs knows twenty-two different ways to kill a man.' Hello! Excuse me? _That_ girl? Like, note to self: never make May angry. She'll sic Killer Babs on me."

Emily nodded. "First thing she told me when she called after basic training was that line. And I was all, Well, okay then. How many ways are there to kill a woman?"

"Twenty-three," Miranda and I answered with solemn mouths.

Stacey's eyes bugged out. "Um. Right. So!" She giggled and scratched her nose. "Me and Babs were choreographing our first routine of the basketball season—okay, she was, and I was being helpful by making her sex it up a bit. She was just so precise, she could forget the purpose of it all."

"To be a whore?" Miranda suggested, and Stacey glared at her, tossing a candle at her head.

"No," Stacey hissed. "To make it, like, electric and stuff. Make the routine really rock. Pop out at people. What Jessi calls the Eye-off Effect: you can't keep your eyes off of the dancer because of…and for poms, it's the sexiness. Barbara was too into being clean and accurate, not enough of the fun stuff. So, anyway. Babs wanted to do something special for Lee—that's what we call Logan to annoy him—so she had picked the song that he listened to right before a game starts which, that season, was Jay-Z's song 'Show Me What You Got,' okay? So, we had the gym all to ourselves, and we had that song on a loop, right, and we were messing around with moves and stuff, and then Babs runs up the bleachers a bit and starts rapping along with Jay-Z."

Stacey took a sip of water. "It's nothing too funny or special, but just…I was at midcourt, she was running around the bleachers, and we were just shouting along and being totally lame. And then Babs tried to teach me to do a tumbling pass, but that didn't happen, and…we just had so much fun, I can't really put it into words. Football season was fun, and we had been getting along really well, but that was the first moment that I think I thought, Babs Hirsch is actually my friend. And I was really happy about that."

"She loved poms. She had so much fun with you, Stace," Miranda said, her voice soft like feathers. She turned to Erin and Jeremy. "Barbara's sister, Celia, was a great dancer, and Babs worked so hard to be as good as Celia, and I think she was better than her sister by the end of senior year."

"She didn't try out for cheer in middle school because she was too scared, she wasn't ready," Emily said. "But then we went to Israel, and she just came back with so much strength? And that's my favorite memory. Babsie and me in Israel, a day after the whole Navit thing exploded. When we arrived—" Emily's voice crackled, and her eyes welled over with tears. She started fanning at her face, but she couldn't make it stop. She began to weep, and Miranda put her arms around her best friend, rocking her back and forth, whispering that it was okay. To take her time. That it was okay.

It was okay to mourn.

Emily swallowed hard and struggled her speech over her tears. "Babs fell to her knees when she got on the ground, she just collapsed, she was so overwhelmed. And, I mean, I'm Jewish and all, but not like her or Anna Stevenson, right, but even I was really overwhelmed to be there, but watching Barbara, it was like—I understood Zionism so well in that moment, that all of us are searching for a home. And Barbara had been so depressed after Amelia died, she had been so lost, and I was watching her hold the earth in her hands as she cried, and this soldier leaned over and rubbed her shoulder and held her, and he had tears in his eyes, too. It was the most incredible moment."

Wiping her eyes with the balls of her fists, Emily took in a ragged breath. I felt the burn of tears spilling out of my eyes as the song in the stereo switched over and bled out _Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you_. Emily breathed in and out and said, "So, we were at a kibbutz, and I kinda fell in love with my host sister, Navit, the most incredible person I had ever met. She was intense like me, but she knew how to listen, too, and…she was me. But a grown up me, and I just…yeah. And Barbara and I spent some time apart, but I would see her and see her growing so strong and confident, like she was getting her feet back from under her for the first time since Amelia died. The first time, though, that we spent real time together was after we left the kibbutz, when no one else was speaking to me but her. And she swore that she still loved _me_, and that she was there for me."

I knew what was coming next, and I tried to brace myself. I tried to make it stop, but the crying was something larger than me. It was coming from a place inside that had really never stopped crying after all of these years. Water, water from the former firegirl.

"We went to Jerusalem for a few days, and the first day, we went to Yad Vashem, the big Holocaust remembrance memorial—lots of museums and things and all. We had all day, so Babs and I spent it together. We went through all of the museums, we walked along the Avenue of the Righteous, we saw Oskar Schindler's grave and left stones…it was so moving, I can't really put it into words. And then, Barbara wanted to go over to the military cemetery next to Yad Vashem. So—we did—and we were just winding through it, and she started to cry, and she fell down to her knees again, holding the necklace of Amelia's that Mr. and Mrs. Freeman gave to her, and she was thanking Amelia in Hebrew. Because Amelia led her here, to Israel, and…Babs looked up at me."

_This—this is what I am going to do_, Barbara whispered, staring around at the cemetery, at the graves. One hand tucked around that necklace, one hand clutching at her curls, a hand full of red hair, red like blood. _I am going to fight for Israel, Emily. This is what I was meant to be. I have to. _

Emily sat down next to Barbara. _Are you sure? Babs, really? You want to…be a solider? This isn't like America—I mean, you could get sent to Iraq now, but…Israeli soldiers are always ready for war, honey. Are you sure you'd want that?_

_This is my purpose_, Barbara breathed, gasping over her tears. _This is why I was born. To fight for Israel. I know it. I can feel it inside of me._

"I wish I had been there to see that," Miranda whispered, brushing Emily's face with her own wet fingers.

"Me, too," I sniffed.

Miranda cleared her throat and wiped her face. "Mine isn't sad, I promise," she said in a rushed voice, her arms still around Emily. "It's not my favorite, exactly, but I just had this one on the brain. Okay. So, Babs dated this ass named Trevor for way too long, and he dumped her sophomore year. And for, what, two months, May? Two months, Babs was just devastated. And I admit, I wasn't the greatest friend for the tail end of that—I had just started dating Logan, and at the beginning, things were really awesome with us, and we were kinda in our own world—especially when he let me in on his family situation, from there on out, we were kinda…"

"Annoying as fuck?" Emily supplied, rolling her still-bright eyes. "Completely shutting us all out and lying as to why? To this day, I'm still furious you didn't just tell me _why_ his mom was so depressed. You know I wouldn't have told anyone."

"I know," Miranda sighed. "But—you didn't see some of the shit that went on. It didn't feel right to tell his secret. I couldn't, not when I was, you know, so into him. Once I woke up from the stupor, then I wised up. At any rate," Miranda said, shaking her hands to wipe it away. "So, I'm at the Brunos', making dinner with Logan, and the doorbell rings, and he jumps a foot in the air because _nobody_ comes over to their house, and guess who it is."

"Oh, I know!" Jeremy crowed. "Babs!"

"Yes!" Miranda giggled. "And Logan's just about to shoo her away, but she barrels right in, all crazed, and she's going, May's leading Group, and Emily's at the JCC down in Greenwich, and you have to help me! This guy asked me out!" Miranda tucked a wad of her thick hair behind her ears, rolling her eyes, "And I'm sorry, since when is that grounds for a panic attack? Anyway, this junior who was in band with her, Nick, asked her out, and she was just like, What do I say! To which I say, Say, Hell yes! So, right there in Logan's kitchen, she called Nick back, just squeezing my hand right off, and she just turned bright red listening to him, just so excited because he was telling her that he had wanted to ask her out for a long time and whatever. She was _so _adorable, it broke my heart."

I clapped my hands. "You were there when it started!"

"I was—I take credit for getting the two of them together, thank you," Miranda said, bowing slightly at the waist. "Okay, May, your turn."

I chewed on my lip. "Well, Logan and I were talking, and he had reminded me of the time that he and Babsie got kicked off the Ferris wheel at the winter carnival for the popcorn throwing, which is a great memory, but I guess…well. Logan and I flew to Indiana to see Barbara—right in the middle of the week, when he didn't have any games, he got permission from Coach, and we both skipped two days of classes, but we had to. We wanted to see Babs so bad."

"Yeah," Emily whispered. "Miranda and I got there on Thursday, so we all had that one day together."

"Well, my favorite moment—or, my favorite moment at _this_ minute—was when Nick had Logan and Babs go get us all coffee for our breakfast? And he sat the three of us down," I said. Keep talking. You can cry, but you have to keep _talking_, Mary Anne.

Nick had us sit on the couch, and he sat down on the floor in front of us. His apartment was packed, ready for his move to Israel the next month. "So, okay, this is no surprise," he blushed, pulling out a small jeweler's box. "She knows it's coming."

"At least you didn't let her pick out her own ring," Miranda told him, reaching forward to pat his shoulder. "That would have been too easy."

He grinned at me. "Yeah, well, having May's assistance was a big help."

"The internet is a wonderful place," I laughed. "I had so much fun building rings? I very much hope that your own fiancé's use my vast knowledge," I noted, pointing at the girls.

Emily shook her head with an annoyed grunt. "I trust Jake Gyllenhaal to pick out the right ring on his own."

"Right, then," Nick said, rolling his eyes. "Anyway. I want to propose tonight, after the game at dinner. With all of you there, but…before that. I asked her dad for her hand at her graduation, and he said yes, and—"

"Not Stepmonster? Gee, Nick, what a loss," Miranda giggled, putting the back of her hand on her forehead.

"Anyway," he said loudly, "asking her dad? Whatever. The big one is…well, you girls are her family. So. I'm asking. Do I have your permission to ask the lovely Barbara Idit for her hand in marriage?"

Emily glanced at Miranda. "To be real? I think the person you have to ask is May. She's Babs's girl, you better make sure it's cool with her if you take her Babsie away."

I smiled as Nick wheeled around to face me, scooting his body so close that I could smell the birch scent of his cologne, the tang of nervous sweat on his skin. "So, Mary Anne. May I marry your best friend?"

"Please, please do," I said, bounding out of my place to leap in his arms. "I'm so happy for you!"

"Me, too!" he squealed, holding me tight. "This is just—this is—" He shook his head into my shoulder. "I'm so happy, my smile is, like, cutting off all of the oxygen to my brain."

I kissed his cheek as the door to the apartment burst open. "We got muffins," Barbara sang, dancing into the room with a bag in her arms and a cardboard tray of Starbucks cups. She blinked, staring down at the heap of her love and me. "Are we interrupting?"

Nick opened his mouth, sneaking the box back into his pocket, as I blurted out, "Yes. You are. I'm sorry, but we can't hide it anymore—Nick and I are in love."

Barbara's eyes widened, and she tipped back her head and laughed, her curls ringing like bells around her face. "Oh, don't _even_," she gasped, holding her stomach. She put the food and drinks on the small table and ran over to us, pouncing on our bodies. "Catfight!" she squealed, grabbing a pillow off of the couch and thwacking me on the back with it.

"Oh, I am so in on that," Miranda yelped, taking another pillow and hitting Barbara. Emily laughed, jumping onto the floor and pounding Miranda with a green pillow. We leapt around each other, screaming with laughter until the pillows billowed open, snowing the room with feathers, covering us in white, the bright, light feel of being together, being _here_, and being so happy that we could cover the world in it.

Why did it have to end? So soon after that—why did it have to end?

I blinked, bringing the table back in focus. I raised my fork full of cake into the air. "Happy birthday, Babsie."

"Happy birthday," the others echoed, and we tapped our forks together before taking the first bite of her cake.

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Emily fanned the small fire, her face curling in satisfaction as the flames began to lick higher in the pile of wood and newspaper. "I give good fire," she grinned up at us.

Miranda tipped a sparkler into the fire, and when it hissed to life, she held it up in the air and curled out, _Randa is the bomb_. I stared at her, and she gaped at me. "What? Sparklers make me feel self-congratulatory."

My laughter began in silence, cracking to life as I bent over on my knees. Miranda slapped me on the shoulder. "Dude, when you were little, didn't you write your name and stuff with sparklers? I just took it step farther—I love seeing my name in lights."

"Please," Emily snorted, opening her purse. "Okay. I have letters from Celia, Stacey, Dawn, Logan, Rabbi Zalman, Davis, and the three of us." She glanced up at me. "Nick never wrote you back?"

"No," I sighed, sitting down next to her. I stared a few feet away at the ocean, its whispers against the sand a lullaby. "Logan called him, and Nicky said he still isn't ready. I don't think he ever will be."

Emily's voice grew thick as she asked, "Do you think…in five years, do you think anyone else will care but us? When we ask, do you think they'll still celebrate her? Or miss her?"

"I don't know," I choked out, putting my arms around her. Miranda tossed her sparkler into the fire, balling her body against ours. "I think Celia will, of course, and maybe Stacey. Logan will. But I don't know."

Emily pulled her knees up to her chest. "I don't want them to forget her. _I_ don't want to forget her. Ever." She grabbed me hard by the shoulder and gave me a fierce shake. "We will not do this for you, Mary Anne Spier, do you understand me?"

"Emmy and me can't do this for both of you," Miranda sobbed, slumping against me. "You're not allowed to be with her, never, never. You stay here with us, understand?"

For a while, all we did was cry, the sound of our tears folding under the snapping of the fire, the hum of the water rumbling to shore. Finally, Emily pulled back, snorting back her stuffy nose. "Okay. Well. Now that's done."

"And for the record," Miranda added, tapping me on the head, "if you die, your poor angel will be all alone because this is not a _Lifetime_ movie. Nobody here is going to do you the favor of falling in love with him and stuff. We know him too well," she said, rolling her eyes.

"But—guys, I'm really, really serious," I said, holding both of their hands. "I know, no dying, but I have to say this. I'm terrified of what he would do. And if he's alone with a baby…please, promise me that you'd take care of him. Don't let him slip away."

Miranda took in a breath. "I know how to help him through a rough time. I promise you, _if_ you get hit by a car—because you are _not_ going to die of cancer, May, we will only accept acts of fate or what have you—I will take care of him. He shouldn't be left to his parents." She pulled back her thick mound of loose curled hair into a ponytail holder. "They'd screw him up more. Don't worry. Emmy and I discussed this."

"Should we?" Emily asked, pointing at her purse. As I frowned at the two of them, Emily pulled out two more envelopes and handing them both to me. They were open across the top, the ragged mouths worn from too much touch. I pulled out the first letter.

_Dear Emily: Congratulations, and welcome to the class of 2011 at Duke University!_

I gasped, dropping the letter and covering my face. Miranda poked me with the other envelope. "Read, read," she urged. With shaking hands, I pulled out a letter that exclaimed, _Dear Ms. Schillabar: We are excited to inform you of your acceptance for transfer to North Carolina State University at Raleigh!_

My mouth couldn't make words escape. They just laid there, dumb and empty, on my tongue. Miranda blushed, rubbing her cheeks. "I'm still waiting on UNC—I tried transferring there for the beginning of sophomore year? But I got wait listed and didn't get off of it. So I kicked my ass this past year with classes and did more stuff on campus, so I hope I have a good shot. If not, I'm only twenty, thirty minutes away from you at most. I'm totally transferring—I need to get away from UConn. Too many SHSers." Her face clouded for a moment, and I could see a miserable flash in her eyes. "It's like high school all over again—I hang out with them, they're in my dorm, I see them at games? It's time to move on. Besides. I'm restless."

"But—you love snow," I managed.

"Yeah, but I was hoping to go to Emory—I can handle a couple years away. And then I'll go back to Connecticut, probably Stamford, get a marketing job there. It's just…okay, I'll be blunt. It's Alan. I could deal with the old crowd if he wasn't a part of it. As long as he's around, it's like…he's still hung up on Claudia Kishi, and there's a part of me that is still hurt that I couldn't measure up to that bitch, you know? Not like I'm some rapist," she spat. "And it's humiliating to be around him with everyone, to have them all know that he dumped me because he's still in love with the memory of her and what they had. I need to come somewhere where there aren't ghosts of who we were and what we used to do hanging around. And at UConn, I feel like I'll never grow up past Randa from SHS because everybody that I hang out with thinks who they are, the same way they were from back then, is good enough."

"We all have to grow up," I murmured, clutching the envelopes.

"Exactly. That, and I miss you and Emmy so much. I just can't handle the desert. I tried, but my visit to Arizona, I was dying, wasn't I?" she prompted Emily.

Laughing, Emily said, "Dude, she practically draped herself on the air conditioner and cried when the thermometer reached ninety-five degrees."

"In _March_!" Miranda howled. "That's inhuman!"

I shrugged, grinning at them both. "Logan and I really loved Arizona. We put it on our list of places for my PhD. He really wants to go to a school that's big on football—his cousin goes to Ohio State, and seeing a game there just spoiled him beyond belief. He loves hot weather, and sunshine is good for me. Serotonin," I said, and Emily gave me a knowing nod. "Anyway, what about you, Emmy?"

She took in a deep breath. "I'm not sure. If Randa hadn't gotten in to NC State—or hopefully UNC—yes, I would have come, no hesitation. We do _not_ want you alone. I'm sorry, but after Babs, I can't handle the idea of you…without us, you know? But—" She sighed, pulling her hands through her hair. "On one hand, I'm really happy at UA. I love Tucson, I love the desert, I have a sweet ass gig at the paper…really, I cannot complain. But, on the other hand, I miss you both so much, and this would be our very last chance to be together, unless by some miracle May and me end up in the same city." She tapped my leg. "Arizona State, girl. Phoenix newspaper for me, school for you."

I grinned as she continued, "That, and my parents are flipping out, they are so excited. I mean, Duke's the fifth best school in America, they always thought I was slumming it at Arizona. And call me conceited, but I'm kinda liking the validation of this—you go to Duke, everybody thinks you're fucking smart. It's impressive. And? The ACC is a banging conference, I spoke to the editor of your school paper, and he practically shot his wad at the idea of me coming—he promised me a column like the one I have at UA, the one about girls and sports and whatever. Can't promise me a column like I have during the season, though. So, yeah, anyway, it's not just for you, don't worry. I have until August first, so I'm going to take my time and think it out."

"Good. Take your time," I urged. "I want you to come for selfish reasons, and also the fact that, as a proud Dookie, I think my school is the best in the world."

Emily snorted. "Gee, really?"

"At the very least, you'll have me. And maybe Dawn," Miranda added, raising her eyebrows. I waved my hands. We had talked that one out long enough. "I'm thinking that the baby should now be named Randa. Randa Spier."

"Um, baby would probably get _his_ last name," Emily noted, rubbing my belly.

Miranda gave me a disgusted look. "Do not give in, May! Bruno is a weird name. Spier, much more attractive." She put her hand on my stomach, too, and their fingers curled against the thin fabric of my dress. For a moment, I thought it was the tumble of their touch. But no.

A flutter. From inside of my skin. Like the roll of pennies on the ground, rattling and spinning in place. And then again, in a spot a few inches away from the first feeling. Miranda and Emily didn't notice—they wouldn't, not yet—but I did. I could feel it.

Feel my baby kicking.

"Guys," I whispered, pressing my hands down on theirs. "I can feel her. Him. Kicking, I can feel the baby kicking."

Emily gasped, pressing down harder on my abdomen. I shifted her hand to where the fluttering was quick under my stomach, but she gave me a blank look, a desperate look, before shaking her head. I tipped my head back against Miranda and let out a ragged sigh of relief. My baby, my baby was well.

This baby was still there. Growing stronger, growing larger. Growing up.

"I'll need to call Logan," I said, beaming at them both.

"Why? It's not like he could feel it," Miranda grumped, shifting her hand around my stomach, her eyes narrowed at the bump. "Damn, you baby! Kick Mommy harder!"

Emily shoved her. "Be nice, I bet it can hear you. See?" She leaned down and said into my belly button, "This is Auntie Emily, the _nice_ Auntie. Randa and Dawn are the crazies. Just remember who was sane and normal the first time you said hello, okay?"

"On Babs's birthday," I murmured. "I'll never forget this."

Emily squeezed my shoulder. "Let's finish up here, that way you can call him, and we can get some sleep." She helped me to my feet, and we stood around the fire. Emily let the letters for Barbara fall in the flames, and within a minute, they were eaten away into ash, the smoke of the paper swirling up into the sky, dissolving into the night on its path up to the stars.

Stars that sparkled like diamonds. Like eyes, crinkling at the corners and gazing down to watch over us.

Miranda handed out a sparkler for each of us and turned up the boom box, a horrible Nick Lachey song that Barbara loved streaming out of the speakers. "What we suffer through for Babs," she sighed, glaring down at the small stereo.

"For reals," Emily agreed. "We're so awesome sometimes." I giggled, bending down to set my sparkler alight. I held it up in the air like a baton. "To us," Emily declared. "To August 13, 2003, to finding each other at the exact right moment in time."

"To every good moment that the four of us had—and to the bad ones, for making us appreciate the good even more. To being this lucky," Miranda said, swishing her sparkler around, the spit of white light making her face look so pale and wistful in its halo.

"To Barbara Idit Hirsch, our Babsie. Because she loved us," I said, swirling my sparkler in the shape of her name. Over and over again, I drew her name bright like a shield against the canvas of the night, my baby's metronome of kicking echoing my heart. I drew and drew until _Babs_ was burned into the inky air, until I could see it as clear as my hands when the sparkler extinguished and fell dark.


	22. Chapter 19

A few thanks: Rena22 and Daveysmommy for research assistance about "location" and my usual props to felicityfive for her mapping of Durham/Chapel Hill. And though he'll never read this, a big thanks to my university's star forward, one of my students this past term. At fifteen, he decided to switch from baseball to "screwing around in the gym" and is now totally NBA bound. He was a great resource for my big story in my writing workshop and here, too (duh). Here's to a great season, buddy.

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Stacey let out a large yawn, stretching her body in an undulating line in the bake of the parking lot. She adjusted the waistband of her shorts and then picked at the straps of her terry cloth bikini top. "Are we expected to dive, too? Because this sucker will totally fall off, I can feel it."

I shrugged, trying to get the bone-breaking exhaustion off of my body. I could tell, this wasn't depression, this was the chemo. I shivered it back and said, "I don't know—I think if you jump in a straight line, it should be fine. You took off your pump, right?" I asked, glancing down at the scar on her abdomen.

"Yup yup—everything's good, don't worry," she smiled, rubbing my back. Emily locked the driver's door of my car and walked up, staring at the diving platform rising above the gate of the pool. I could see Kerry up there, raising her arms parallel to the apparatus before launching herself in a twist and plunging down in a series of somersaults before disappearing below the line of the gate.

Miranda slung her tote bag higher on her shoulder. "That girl is still the most annoying thing in the world, but damn, that was cool." She tipped her head at the entrance, and I nodded, following her into the YMCA entrance and paying an entry fee. The moment we entered the pool, Dawn shouted at us, "Wait, wait! Jeff's gonna dive again!"

I gasped, scrambling over to the side of the pool to get a good look at my stepbrother. Even from this far away, he looked terrified, leaning down to gaze at the full ten-meter height. There was a tightness in his face that took my breath away—Kerry had convinced me to dive headfirst from the seven-meter platform during my senior year, and I had screamed the entire way down, my legs hitting the brick-hard water of her club's pool at a painful angle. That moment when you torpedo below the surface, too fast, too out of control, the ache spreading over your body from the wrongness of the impact, it's the scariest in the world. Because you propel down, down into the blue daze of the water, so far away from the surface.

But the thrill of flight—that makes it worth it.

Kerry came up next to him and rubbed his shoulder. She nudged him down to meet her face, and they exchanged a kiss that sent a shiver through my body. Those sweet first kisses, sugared with excitement. She stepped back and slapped her hands in her thighs. "One—two—go!" Kerry hollered, and Jeff bounced on his toes and leaned forward off of the apparatus, his hands clasped and pointing down at the water. He dropped down, flinging his legs into a straight line and drilling down to the water; his body arrowed below the water, and a moment later, he came back to the surface, gasping for air and pumping his fists.

"Bitchin'!" he screamed, pounding his hands into the water.

He paddled over to the side and hauled his body out of the water, grinning at me. "Did you see that?" he panted. "I dove, dude, it was freakin' awesome!"

"You were so cool," I beamed, giving him a hug.

He waved at the four of us. "Come on up, Kerry'll teach you how to dive."

Emily clapped her hands. "Oh, fun, I've always wanted to jump off the high dive."

I tugged her back. "Hey, Kay—make your brother jump."

Kerry laughed, walking past Dawn and kicking her leg against something I couldn't see. "Get up, lazybones," she commanded. "Your wife wants to see you do the twirlies."

After a moment, Logan rose up from the surface of the platform. "I'm up to three rolls now," he yelled down at me.

"Yeah, and then you hit the surface like a fallen tree," I teased. "I'll duck behind Stacey to block the splash."

"Don't use me," Stacey said, shoving Miranda in front of us. "I've got cute beach hair."

I could hear the quiet sounds of Logan and Kerry bickering, laughing, the lick of a taunt as he lined his toes up at the edge of the concrete. I could tell from the way he was staring at it that he was thinking about the distance between his body and that ledge. His head and his ledge. He closed his eyes, and his chest rose thick with air as he bounced on the edge and leapt outward, rolling in three quick somersaults before hitting the surface in a dangerous lean, sending water rocking all over the pool.

"Ew," Miranda scoffed, wiping the spray off of her face. Emily, Stacey, and she walked over to the ladder and began climbing up as Logan broke the surface next to the ladder.

"I'm totally the next gold medalist in 2012, aren't I?" he grinned, hopping out of the pool.

I laughed, wrapping my arms around his slick chest. "You are the champion of bad landings, no one can touch you on that."

He grimaced, clenching down on his teeth before sliding his lips over my neck. "_Tesorina mia_," he murmured into my skin, his fingers curling into my hair."_Mi manchi così tanto da star male. Ho bisogno di sentirti con te ogni giorno, tesorina._ _Non li desidero andare_. I mean, really, I can't stand that you're gonna ditch me again for Carbondale."

"Me ditch you?" I breathed, clenching my arms tight to his skin. "_Non penso così_, angel. You could have come to the beach, you know. No, no, you had to go play Adventure in Birthday Baby-sitting in Athens. How bad was it?"

"So bad that I honestly almost drank," he admitted, tucking his tongue in the nape of my neck. "Not because I, like, wanted to get drunk with them all? But then I wouldn't be in charge. And Meyers promised he'd stay sober last night, but no. No, no, no." He rolled his eyes and rested his head on my shoulder. "Horrible."

"You had a blast, didn't you," I grinned.

"Until the puking? Of course," he answered. His teeth nipped on the soft skin of my ear. "My twenty-first is going to be scary, pretty girl."

"Remind me to leave town," I replied, taking a deep breath through my nose.

His fingers ran through my hair again. "Anything eventful today?"

"Nah. We beached, we brunched, we beached some more. Oh, okay, Erin said once her classes end, she's gonna stay the rest of the summer there? And that we can come any time during the week—will that work, with the bartending?" I asked, hooking my thumbs in the wet waistband of his suit.

His brow creased. "I think? My first night is Friday, so they said I'd get my schedule then. It's more, I need to give the hospital a week's notice so they can put on another volunteer in my place—they weren't too pleased at the short notice about this week, right? So, we can't jet off at a moment's notice. I already put in for that weekend in August, though."

I twisted my lip to the side and chewed on the pillow of skin. "Your family kinda makes me nervous. They're so loud when all of you Brunos are together."

"Hunter'll protect you," he promised, kissing my forehead.

"And what about you?" I said, letting out a scuffing noise of disbelief.

"Are you kidding?" he grinned. "I'll be surgically attached to the barbeque. You think me and Mom make a great sauce? My mamaw has this secret…something, she won't tell anyone, but it turns the sauce into heroin, it's so damn addictive."

I pinched his hipbone and squeaked, "Are you going to kiss me? On the lips?"

His smile slid in a wicked way, tongue peeking out. "I was wondering when you would break. You are weak, Mary Anne."

"Oh, well, then, forget it," I sniffed, turning away from him. Logan snagged his arms around my body, rocking me back on my feet and tugging me against him; he curled his head around my neck and landed his lips on mine, his fingers tracing over the side of my head. My eyes crept open, and I watched him, the soft way his muscles laid over the bones of his face as he kissed me. And then everything went blue as his eyes opened to meet mine. I tucked my tongue behind the clean line of his teeth and brushed the mint taste over me.

We pulled back, and I sighed against him. "Angel, I don't feel so good."

"What it is?" he whispered.

"It's just chemo drain," I admitted, "but I'm kinda worn out. Do you think Kerry would mind if I just rested here for a bit? I don't think I can make my way up that ladder."

"Do you want to go home?" he asked. "We can just go. Put on a movie, rest up…I mean, Em and Randa are leaving, and we have a long day tomorrow—really, Mary Anne, you've seen Kerry dive enough."

I moved my lips back and forth, thinking, thinking. I probably should go home, make dinner, gather up my energy to say goodbye. "Yell up to Kerry and tell her to do her favorite dive for me. I love that one. Then we can go."

He glanced up at the platform where Emily and Miranda were gazing down, wriggling around and squawking with nervousness. "Sure," he said. He stepped back and cupped his hands over his mouth. "Hey, _Alladola_? Mary Anne needs to go home, will you do your ace dive for her before we go?"

"You want us to come?" Miranda yelled back.

"No, have fun," I called to her, waving. "Don't break your neck, okay?"

"You are such a killjoy," Dawn laughed, dangling her legs over the side. I stared at her for a moment too long—how had _her_ weekend been?

Kerry strode up to the lip of the platform and did a slow cartwheel onto her hands, her legs split for a long moment until she centered herself and pulled them into a straight line above her body. She held herself there for such a long moment—I could see her body shadowed by the others on the platform, their mouths yawning open in awe.

This is what it looks like to be fearless.

"I thought her favorite was the one where she touched her toes and then did the straight line plunge—that's _my_ favorite one of hers," I said, my voice barely registering above the hum of the filter.

"Come on, _tesorina_—Kerry's favorite dive is whatever scored the highest at her last meet," Logan grinned, gazing up at his sister. We watched her, erect and waiting, and he breathed, "I am so lucky I'm her brother."

I put his hands on my stomach. "I want our kids to love each other the way you and Hunt and Kerry do. I don't want them to be like me and Jeff and Dawn. I love the way you three just adore each other."

"It's easy when they're this cool," he said, and I could feel the heat from his cheeks as he stared at her. "She's grown up so much—it's like, my best friends in the world go you, her, and then Dave. And when Hunt gets a bit older, him, too. I just—" He reached up and pressed his hand to the top of his head. "I just want Kerry to be happy. And I'm scared that under all of her toughness, she's not very happy sometimes, but she won't—or can't—admit it."

Kerry's body began to bend, her head sinking low to the platform as her chest dipped parallel to the concrete, legs whipping down. Her hands shoved up, and her body began to spin in a spike, twisting her around once, before her arms shot out straight, perpendicular to her sides and she tucked into four somersaults before extending back into a line and slipping beneath the pool's surface, a small dribble of a splash kicking out of the water.

I didn't realize I had been holding my breath. "How is she not the best in the whole world?" I exclaimed, watching the shadow of her body rising back up towards us.

"I know, right?" he sighed. "Stupid Chinese. Stupid Canadians." He smiled as she popped back up. "She should place top five at nationals in August, Pierce thinks so. That's why Mom and Dad aren't moving officially until then, they want him to coach her out of the season. Oh, did I tell you? She wants a tattoo—of the Olympic rings, she wants it on her shoulder blade, as motivation."

"What did you tell her?" I asked as Kerry came over.

"What did I say about the tattoo?" Logan said to her.

She wrung the water out of her braid as she laughed. "That if I got to London, _he'd_ get one that said, 'My sister went to the Olympics, and all I got was this lousy, permanent reminder of my inferiority.' Which now makes me even more determined to get there. Seriously, though, on my eighteenth, we should get inked."

"Wrong," he answered. "Shawn told me that a tattoo would look like I'm trying too hard to be hip, that I need to accept the fact that I am the antithesis of hip."

"I'm sure that's what he said, 'antithesis,'" Kerry rolled her eyes. "How 'bout you, Mary Anne? Wanna get a tat?"

I raised my eyebrows at her. "Me."

"It could say, 'Screw cancer,'" Kerry grinned, touching my right arm and tracing a circle.

"If you get to London in three years, I will…get the rings, too," I offered. "How 'bout _that_ as motivation. You can make me into a badass."

Logan stared at me. "Ker, I will give you two hundred bucks to make it to London."

"No, no," she said, cocking her head at me. "I'll do it for free. That's totally worth it." She gnawed on the tip of her tongue and glanced up at her brother. "Jeff did a nice dive, doncha think?"

"I think…you're changing the subject so I can gush about how much I like you two together or something?" he replied, grabbing the end of her braid. "I do not like this, bird. I don't know what you're trying to prove here, but it's not you, okay?"

She wrenched her hair away and took a step back from him. "What, I'm supposed to be a freakin' nun? I'm not allowed to have a boy like me or want to touch me? I'm sorry, Loey, but you're not the only person in our family who gets to be wanted like that," She smudged a kiss on my cheek. "I'll see you back home, _sis_," she said, hissing the word at her brother before stalking away.

I sighed, grabbing my shoulder bag. "Did you have to do that?"

"I do _not_ like them together," Logan spat. "Jeff treats girls like objects, he's slept with four girls already, okay, he told me. It's like he's trying to be Dawn, the way she goes through guys like paper, but she does it because Dawn doesn't believe in monogamy. He's doing it to prove something about himself, and it's gross to me, okay? I told him that, straight up, and he laughed at me, said I was so Catholic. And then he launched into this, like, lecture? About how I was a hypocrite because Dawn told _him_ that you and I slept together so soon after we started dating, but all I do is make people feel bad about hooking up. And he threw freshman year in my face, about how I didn't want to do anything with the girls I went out on dates with when you and me were seeing other people—and, it's like, instead of defending myself, I started worrying about that. Am I a hypocrite, am I a bad person? Who am I to judge?"

"You don't judge," I assured him as we left the pool. "I'm worried about Jeff, too. I think he's just really defensive—but he sees Kerry as a conquest, but she sees him as a guy who's not scared of her. I don't think she gets it. And he doesn't get it if he's making you feel bad about yourself," I added, standing by the side of his car as he opened up my door for me. I waited for him to start up the car before I said, "And you and me back then…things were complicated."

He pressed his lips together, making the skin around his mouth go white. His eyes were filled with thought, so I leaned back against the seat and waited for him to be ready. The sound of his breath running quick through his nose made me look over at him. "Can I tell you a secret?" he asked, glancing over at me while we idled at a stoplight.

I nodded, and he sighed. "The night of the Valentine's Day dance at the Yale hospital—when you and Barbara left the common room, and I stayed behind to play with the little kids? I thought, fuck, what if this was my chance to have a dance or something with Mary Anne? You were so tired and sick, and it was only the second week of your treatment, I was so scared that it meant that you might not make it."

Logan drove us through the intersection and stared ahead. I frowned, watching him move us across town and back to the house in silence. It wasn't until we parked in the driveway, unsnapping our seatbelts, that he turned to face me again. "I had these great visions," he said in a hushed voice. "You and me, after you made remission. Maybe at a hotel or one of them fancy bed and breakfast places or the cabins at the state parks or even Dave's apartment on a weekend where he went down to visit his dad. I wanted it to be so perfect, okay, I wanted you to be healthy and better, I didn't want to rush anything—I wanted it to be really special for you. And for me. I didn't plan on one month after we had our first real date."

I shuffled across the bench of the front seats and leaned against him to listen to the rumble of his breathing, the ticking of his heart. My heart that lived in his chest. He kissed the top of my head. "Mary Anne, I never wanted it to happen the way it did. Sharon's apartment, I mean, come on. It was so unromantic—the place looked like it had been ransacked by schizophrenic burglars. But—I knew, on the fourteenth, that you were my forever girl. I did. And then I realized that I could lose you, that I didn't have the time, the luxury, of making plans months in the future. We only had the time we had, you know? If I wanted to do something, it had to be in that moment, or else I could lose it."

"I used you," I blurted out. "I did. When we were together, I could forget about the cancer because I felt so wanted and beautiful and everything. Normal. I wanted us to move fast because it let me get away from it all." I traced the line of his jaw and sighed. "Logan, nobody knows us but us. Don't let anyone make you feel bad about yourself. And don't beat yourself up about what's in the past—this is like you watching those hideous YouTube clips of your missed shot against UCLA, okay? You obsess over things that you can't change, but—mistakes, things that didn't go right…all of these things, they brought us here. And then they make us better for what comes next, angel. I wouldn't change a thing in my life. Not a single thing," I declared, cupping his face in my hands.

He was quiet for a moment before he kissed me. "Stupid YouTube. I swear, I could spend half my day just playing around on that site."

"And the other half on ESPN's website," I laughed, kissing him again, long enough to forget whose lips were whose, before I got out of the car. "Which reminds me—when I get back from Carbondale, Stacey and I have a date for her to teach me about football. She and Emily and I decided that it was time."

"You know, learning basketball may be more useful," he hinted, opening the gate to the backyard for us.

I waved my hand. "Listen, darling husband, during the fall, I lose you for four days a week to that dumb football stuff. Monday nights, Thursday nights, and then the entire weekend. Not that it's not hysterical to watch you yelling at the television, as if the little men inside of the glowing box can actually hear you, as if they would look up and go, Hey, Logan, you're right. We'll do whatever you say." I circled my hands and concluded, "Therefore, I think it's time for me to understand what you're shouting."

"To laugh with me and not at me?" he smarmed, bending to my height while he slid the back door open.

"That's right," I smiled, smearing his lips with kisses before slipping into the house. J.D. came like a crazed dart at my legs, and I laughed, picking her up in my arms and holding her tight. "Hi, baby," I cooed, nuzzling my face in her fur. "Did you like Georgia?"

"We tried to find UGA for her—you know, a nice, strong man dog, I thought they would make the perfect couple," Logan said, clapping his hands over his heart.

"UGA is a bulldog," I gasped, clutching tighter to J.D. "My sweet little beagle with a big, nasty bulldog? I saw that photo—UGA tried to bite that poor player from Auburn."

"Yeah, well, that guy asked for it—he taunted the dog after the touchdown! You don't taunt UGA," Logan declared, walking into the kitchen. "Anyway, we couldn't find him. But I showed J.D. his picture in all of the shops in Athens, and I think she's got a crush."

I hissed into J.D.'s ear, "Ignore him. You can do better." I gave him a suspicious look as I added, "He had a head injury—I think it's made him permanently weird."

He let out an offended huff of air, holding a bell pepper in his hands as if he was going to throw it at my head. Instead, he shook it in his fist and grabbed the half-eaten package of Oreos in the basket Emily had put in the counter. "Upstairs or living room?"

"Living room. Upstairs, I'll fall asleep. Downstairs, it's just a nap," I reasoned. "Wanna watch a movie? It's your turn to pick."

"All of this football talk—I'm thinking either _Friday Night Lights_, _The Replacements_, or _We Are…Marshall_," he told me, squatting down in front of the DVDs.

I lay down on the couch under an afghan that I had knitted, J.D. resting on my legs. "_We Are…Marshall._ I love Matthew McConnaghey, all gruff and emotional." I grinned at him. "And the cute Southern accent thing."

"Never knew you liked that," he drawled, _Lahked thayt_. I felt a rush of red in my body, and I looked down at the dog to avoid his teasing, wanting eyes. He settled down on the couch, and I snuggled my head into his lap as he cleared his throat. "Actually…pretty girl, would you mind looking at Kansas for your PhD? All of this talk about YouTube and stuff reminded me…anyway, would you mind looking into them?"

I stared up at him. "Logan."

"Don't say it," he sighed, taking one of my hands and kissing my knuckles.

"Even Kirk Hinrich missed. Even Kirk Hinrich had bad games," I told him, despite the hard look in his eyes. "Please don't tell me that you were watching a clip of him and beating yourself up again, please."

"I wasn't," he protested. "Really. I think I've finally moved past the UCLA game, I have. Last week, I finally stopped going to that spot on the court and drilling that shot, you know, I've finally stopped." When he closed his eyes, I could see what was there in the darkness of that blink. The ball that left his hands, hurtling to the basket and clanking with a lame thud against the rim. The sound of the buzzer. The end of the game, the season. And somehow, that being his fault alone. "But…with Dad riding on Hunter now? About football and stuff? It just reminds me of why I do this. Why this is my life. And Kansas has a lot to do with it, you know? I don't want us to go there just because of that, but I'd like us to think about it at least."

"It snows there," I warned. "A lot. Hard prairie winters and all."

"Yeah, well, 'Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk' can keep me warm," he smiled, tucking our hands under my chin. He closed his eyes again as the DVD popped to life. "I just—you're right. I do this a lot, and I see it in Kerry, this punishment. When we don't get it right, we just beat ourselves up, and it's so exhausting to blame yourself all the time. It's the part of my father in me, right, that obsessive side. And I don't know, I just feel like I'm at a turning point again in my life. Getting married, about to become a dad, maybe. When I think about Kansas, it reminds me that I made a choice once, that I decided to grow up into my own man. I need to keep growing, Mary Anne, I'm not done yet."

"You are growing up into such a wonderful man," I murmured, holding his hand close to my heart.

"Thank you," he said, touching my lips with his fingers. He reached over to the remote and pressed play. "I just want you to be proud of me."

I clenched hard at him. "No, angel. You don't need me to do that. I love you, I love who you are, and you're enough—you don't need to make me proud. I just need you to be you."

"I love you, Mary Anne," he said, drawing over my face with his eyes. "I love you, I do." He pulled my left hand up to his mouth and kissed the gold of my rings. "I do."

Turning, I held his hand against my chest, brushing his fingers over that place that I could feel and letting the electric hum of that nerve flood through my body. He didn't care what I looked like as long as I was me. And I didn't care how he played as long as he was Logan. I had to remind myself, though—the man he was rode on the back of this game. How much he had given up to become this person. How much he had stripped away. I had told him once that his name sounded like the word _lonely_. Logan, lonely. Logan, a name that meant _hollow_.

"That sounds about right," he had sighed, curling his body around mine. "But not anymore."

No, not anymore. His hand stroked over my belly, pressing deep against the skin. The baby wasn't kicking right now—I couldn't wait for him to feel it. I knew it would bring him to his knees in happiness. I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers and prayed that we were doing the right thing.

It felt so right. It did.

I fell asleep within ten minutes, drifting off on a cottoned sea. When I opened my eyes, Logan was gone. In fact, I was upstairs in my bed. Rubbing a hand over my eyes, I tried to place where I was in time. Did I come up here on my own, did he carry me?

But before I could put it all into place, I smelled it—the bitter pop of burning wood. Smoke, crawling with a cruel quickness under the shut door. The house was on fire.

The house was on fire—I was going to burn.

I screamed, leaping out of the bed. I ran over to the door, and the handle was swimming with molten heat, scalding my hand. Wincing, I grabbed the blue fleece off of the bed and wrapped it around my hand so that I could open the door—when I wrenched it open, the roar of the fire that had swallowed the stairs deafened me, and I shut the door and stuffed the blanket against its floor.

Oh, God, oh, God, I'm going to die. My hand roped into my hair, my long, wavy hair. Too long, a lighter brown than it should be. My hands fell down to its ends, breaking over the shore of my round breasts. I squeezed my hands against my red dress, the concave dip of my stomach, and panted. This had to be a dream, this _had_ to be a dream.

I reached up and touched my face with my burned hand—my eyebrows were gone. The heat had seared them off. It felt real.

I ran to the window and yanked it open, slamming the screen out of place. I could jump. I might break my legs, but I could jump at least. When my head tipped to the ground, I saw them: Mom and Barbara and Amelia and Tim.

"Jump!" they yelled, linking their hands like a cradle. "We'll catch you, it's okay, Mary Anne. Jump, please!"

Into their arms, the blanket of their arms.

I climbed onto the ledge and balanced myself above them. "You promise you'll catch me?" I yelled.

"Yes," Mom called out. "Mary Anne, please."

"No, Mary Anne, don't jump," Logan shouted, coming up behind them. "I'll come and get you, don't move, okay? Emily and Miranda are inside, we're coming. Stay there."

"The house is burning," I whimpered. "You'll die."

"Stay there," he repeated, holding out the flat of his palm to me. I tried to tell him no, not to do this, to stay safe, that it was okay for me to leap into my mother's arms, but he ran away, towards the back door. I stared down at the yard, the grass littered with the exploded glass from the windows below.

"May, come on, I've got you," Barbara begged, holding her arms wide.

"Come on, eh? Fly like Lord Flash, like the Royal Flying Corps!" Tim boomed, clapping his hands.

"Logan said he was coming," I said, glancing back at the steaming door, the warped lines of the wood buckling under the press of the fire. I waited, I waited, and when the door finally yielded to the flames, I still expected to see him come.

Instead, a conflagration of a person stumbled into my room. Miranda, every inch of her body erupted into fire. She held her arms open to me, the yellow red canyon of her mouth screaming awake with a whip of smoke. I shrieked, barely looking down before I leapt out of the window, trusting that I would land right.

I hit my mother's body and splashed into a sea.

My body blasted awake, and I scrambled upright and into Logan's startled arms. "What's wrong?" he asked, holding me hard against me. "What's wrong, _tesorina_?"

Emily and Dawn were sitting on the floor, a box of pizza open between them. Emily dropped her slice and hit pause on the DVD, freezing Kate Hudson's dewy face on the screen—what movie was this? How much time had passed?

"May?" Emily asked, touching my leg. "Did you have a nightmare?"

"Where's Miranda?" I gasped, grabbing Logan's face. "Where is she?"

"Upstairs, helping Stacey do Kerry's makeup. Why?" he replied, his eyes flooding in a panic.

I leapt up, screaming out Miranda's name. By the time I reached the stairs, she was thundering down, meeting me halfway. I ran my fingers over the round pool of her face, pale and perfect. The ramble of her dark hair. Everything, everything as it should be.

"Maybelle?" she whispered, letting me run my touch all over her. Making sure she was safe.

"I had this dream…I just had to make sure you were still here," I told her, sitting down on the stair. I slumped my head into my hands and knocked my forehead on her knee. "It was a fire, Miranda. It was a fire dream."

"Oh, God, not again," she moaned. "Emily? Emmy, come here." Emily ran up to us and sat down on the stair with me. "May had a fire nightmare again."

"No," Emily breathed, rubbing my back. She made hushing noises into my ear, circling into my skin. "Do you want me to stay? I bet my editor will let me stay for another day—let me go change my flight, okay?"

"Emma, you have to go home, no," I protested, straightening up. "It wasn't the fire—it wasn't like the old ones, I wasn't—trapped? I could get out. Mom and Babs and Amelia and Tim were there to catch me, but…you, Randa, you came into save me and you were on fire. Maybe you shouldn't transfer," I blurted out. "Maybe that's what it means."

"What is means is, your meds haven't kicked in, and you're worried, that's all," Miranda declared. "Your beautiful mind won't be bossing me around, babe."

Emily sighed. "You should come back with me to L.A., Maybelle. I think some serious, hardcore beaching will do you well. Then, we can go stalk celebrities and pretend that we're paparazzi. Screaming, 'Angelina, Angie, just one photo of you and your billion kids, please!' It'll redefine classy."

"Oh, good times!" Miranda laughed. "I can't wait to come next month."

"You should come then, too," Emily urged.

I shrugged. "My flight home from Carbondale is about all I can afford right now. Take up a collection for me, like UNICEF, and we'll talk." I twisted my fingers into Emily's hair. "Besides, hopefully, I'll be working again."

And I can't take time away from chemo—by then, I would be too tired, too worn. But that had to stay unsaid.

"Here, say goodbye to me now," Emily said. "I want you to go to sleep, okay, as a goodbye present. Dawnie can drive me, and we can discuss the joys of Los Angeles on the way to the airport." Her arms opened, and I slid into her hold. "I love you, my May. Everything's going to be okay, I promise. You have to keep the faith, alright?"

"I love you, Emmy. You're so incredible, you stun me every day," I whispered, squeezing her tight. "I can't bear to let you go."

"It's not letting me go. We're always together, as close as a breath, as long as we love each other," she smiled, kissing my cheek. "Come on, let's get into bed—woof," she purred, tugging me by the hand. "Hey, Randa, go get May's cuddle partner—I want you to come to the airport with me, and she shouldn't be alone right now."

I grinned, following her upstairs. Emily, the practical one, splicing apart a problem and piecing it back right. I climbed under the covers, and Miranda returned a moment later, flopping onto the end of the bed with a _People_ magazine, Logan trailing behind her. Without a word, he slid into the bed behind me and kissed my cheek, pulling the blankets up to our shoulders.

Emily lay down next to me, taking my hands in hers. "I'll stay here until you fall asleep," she promised, brushing a curl out of my eyes.

Miranda flipped a page with an angry hand. "Dude, I can't believe we paused _Almost Famous_ like that. I mean, this show how much Emmy loves you—you know how much she adores The Enemy."

"You are writing a think piece on Arizona basketball," I smiled, holding tight to her hands.

"I am Ben Fong-Torres," she replied in a deep voice. "Sleep, Mary Anne." She leaned forward and kissed my forehead. "Let it all go, let everything go except you."

I leaned back against my husband and held her tight, and I dipped into a dreamless sleep that smoothed back the ragged ends of my self, running over my tired mind, my poor worried mind like a pair of comforting hands.

Mother's hands.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There was a scream, and then a yell. Logan bolted up, and I scrambled out of bed, hauling myself back into my clothes as he pulled on a pair of shorts and ran down the stairs. I followed the sound of the shouting to the study where Kerry was backed into a corner, clutching her arms over her t-shirt clad body.

She pointed at Jeff, holding his bloody nose on the other side of the room. "He kept trying to put his hand down my underwear!" she screamed. "I told him no, and he said that I was a fucking tease, so I hit him—and you deserved it!"

"You are a tease—you're a frigid bitch, Katharine, do you know that? Jordan was right about you, totally, completely right," he shot back, tipping his head to the ceiling.

I slammed my body against Logan's, pinning him against the wall. "You hit him, I'll kill you," I hissed at him.

"He was forcing my sister!" he shouted, pushing against me, but I knocked him back with my hips. "You goddamned piece of shit, in my house? You did this in _my house_?"

"She's the one who told me to get into bed with her, okay? She was the one who started kissing me," Jeff protested, flinging his hands back at Kerry. "She was the one who was making those noises, I was just following her lead. Maybe you should talk to her about sending the most confusing signals in the history of the goddamned world!"

"I said no," Kerry spat. "I told you, I don't do that kind of stuff."

"And it makes you twisted," Jeff retorted. "You think sex is dirty, and that's queer, Kerry. I don't see anyone in this house who's got issues except for you."

"Excuse me?" Stacey hissed, stepping into the room. "God, Jeff, you are such an ass. How dare you make her feel bad for saying no."

He stomped his foot, glaring at each of us before settling on Kerry. "What's the big ass deal! It's just hooking up, what is wrong with all of you! Mary Anne's the biggest goody-goody ever made, and she was fucking your brother when they were—"

I felt my body being pushed away as Logan charged across the room, but Stacey threw herself over my stepbrother. "Beating the living hell out of him is not what you're gonna do," she declared, glaring at my husband. I grabbed Logan's hand and tugged him back, but he shook my hand off and went over to his crying sister, folding his arms around her as she sobbed.

"I don't want to," she gulped. "I don't want to—I don't believe in it, I don't, and I don't want to end up like Mom or Mary Anne, I don't want to."

I froze, slumping against the wall. I was like their mother, I was, I was. A depressed mess, all because of a baby.

I willed the drugs inside of me to pick up steam, to right my mind. Move faster. Move quicker. Save me.

"It's just sex!" Jeff screamed, shoving Stacey away. "If it was such a big deal, then why is everybody doing it? It's nothing sacred, it's nothing precious—if it was, then my goddamned stepmother would not be screwing behind my dad's back." He pounded his fists into his eyes, wiping hard at the wetness there. "If sex was love or anything special, then she wouldn't kiss my father goodbye and tell him how much he means to her and then do it with some fucking UCLA bastard in my own house. _My house_," he managed, folding down on his knees as he began to cry.

I walked over to him and put my hands on his back, but he knocked me away. "Don't touch me," he mumbled, jumping back up to his feet and lurching out of the room, storming up the stairs and slamming the door to his room shut.

For a few minutes, we just lingered, the four of us with Miranda's snoring rising up and down from the living room, an oblivious rumble. Kerry kept wailing into her brother's skin as he pushed his hand down the long river of her gold hair.

Stacey cleared her throat. "Kerry, why don't you come with me, we'll make some coffee, go sit outside and talk."

"Can Logan come?" she asked, holding his hand.

She shrugged. "Sure. But I think that you and I should talk. No offense, Lee, May, but I think I'm the only person in this house who has some insight here."

"None taken," I murmured. "I'm gonna go—"

Jeff was hammering back down the stairs, his duffle bag slung over his shoulder. I gasped, darting into the hall to follow him out the front door. "Where are you going?" I yelled, watching him stomp to the sidewalk and turn towards the main road.

"Airport. Probably can't get anything until tomorrow, but that's fine. I can wait," Jeff sneered, turning around to face me. "Dawn's at the Caribou up on Franklin, so I'll go walk to her, and—"

"She might not be there—she might be with Henry, I think 'writing at the coffee shop' is code for meeting Henry," I said, biting my lip.

"No, she's there," Jeff told me. "She's writing about how she never knew her friend Jill was one of the gold star girls—she texted me right when Kerry and I were leaving dinner, asking me if I was certain I hadn't noticed anything in Jill. Then she asked if a banana caramel soy latte sounded disgusting or not. So, I'll go to her. And then I'll catch a cab up on Franklin. I can't stay here for a second more." He threw down his bag and covered his face with his hands. "I didn't force her, okay? She flipped on me. She wanted something, May, I wasn't making it up."

I walked up to him and put my hands on his shoulders. "Even if she was, when she said stop, she had a right to."

"Carol never said stop," he choked, looking down at the street. "She kept telling him, Oh yes, yes, harder, harder. She just…she wanted it so bad, and I don't get it—why isn't my dad enough for her?" He slumped into my arms. "What did Dad do wrong?"

I rubbed his back, biting my lip. "I don't know, Jeff. But it's not your fault." And you can't punish someone else for saying no because Carol said yes. You can't. But I bit my tongue—it wasn't the time for that. Not when he was sliding against my body and crying like a child. He was a child. He was still just a boy.

Who needed his mother.

I needed to call Sharon.

"I'm gonna go," he mumbled.

"Jeff, come back inside. We'll call Sharon, we'll sit down and talk—do you really want to leave things like this?" I pressed, gesturing back at the house.

Jeff stared at me. "Yeah, I do. Not everything ends well, sis. Sometimes, they just end. Marriages. Life. Sometimes, it just ends." He kissed my cheek. "I'm sorry I upset you, May. Come up and visit me in Stoneybrook, okay? Despite all of this—I'm glad we spent some time together. I'll call you. Tell Logan that I'm sorry."

"And Kerry?" I urged, tipping my head.

He kept his eyes on mine as he let out a hiss of breath and shook his head. "It doesn't matter what I say or what she says, does it. She'll just hear what she wants to hear. Make something up that makes me sound good, I guess. I'll call you," he said again, picking up his bag and heading for Franklin Avenue. I followed him with my gaze until the long dash of his frame turned the corner, swallowed by the shadows that ate up the edges of the road.


	23. Chapter 20

The car was like a cradle, rocking me over and over into sleep. I would wake up, my face rolling up from the pillow to glance over at Logan, my legs stretched into his lap as he navigated us into the mountains on our way north. Whenever I looked back at Kerry, she was still the same, huddled up against the corner of the backseat, staring out the back window, watching where we had been racing away.

He had set Stacey's satellite radio on the dashboard, the station trained to ESPN, and I would fuzz in and out on the talk shows that all sounded the same—men in loud voices, hollering about the same teams. He would laugh, sometimes talk back to the hosts, but usually he just listened.

Until we reached West Virginia, we only stopped twice—once to get gas, once so that I could throw up on the side of the highway, the hang of my chemo pump knocking against my sternum as I retched into the grass.

As my eyes came into focus on the gray faces of the mountains south of Charleston, I reached into my purse and checked for the twelfth time that I had packed all of my rounds of chemo. The orange bottle of pills, staring back at me. Another bottle, pills that I wanted to take. I needed them all.

The golden dome of the West Virginia Statehouse loomed to the left, and Kerry cleared her throat. "Loey? I'm ready to talk."

"Let me get us through the city," Logan answered, glancing in the mirror back at her. "Then we'll stop and have some lunch, okay?"

"Let's get all the way to Huntington—remember that park? I'd like to go there," Kerry replied, tightening her arms around her legs.

His eyes flickered down at mine, and I tightened my lips into a concerned line. We had left Chapel Hill at six-thirty, stopping by the hospital to pick up my pump before jumping on I-40 for our trip to Louisville. For over four hours, she had been silent. For over four hours, nothing had been said. She and Stacey had gone outside with coffee with Logan as a silent witness, the three of them coming back inside with exhausted expressions and red eyes. When we went back upstairs, I had held my husband as he cried as he tried to say his sister's name.

I held his face to my heart and took in all of his pain. Because he loved. Oh, how he loved his sister.

It took another fifty minutes to get to Huntington, but we headed north off of the freeway, taking the exit marked for Marshall University; I shivered, remembering the movie. An entire football team, killed. An entire university, shaken. But how they rose back, like the phoenix. Like me.

It only took a few minutes to reach the park, a shady green strip that flanked a slow muddy river. I looked at it, frowning. "This is the Ohio River? I thought it was bigger—it's a lot bigger in Louisville."

"No, Mary Anne, the Ohio is, like, five minutes north of here," Kerry said, her voice ghosting a smile. "This is just something else."

"A finger river, nothing special," Logan supplied, getting out of the car. He pulled the cooler out of the back, slinging his arm around Kerry as the two of them walked over to a spot under a large oak tree. I followed them, laying the fleece on the grass, and doling out the fruit and sandwiches that we had packed this morning.

"Whenever you want to talk," I told Kerry, touching her ankle.

"I want to talk," Logan announced. "I want to know why I wasn't allowed to beat the crap out of Jeff, okay? I want to know why you stopped me, Mary Anne. That ass tried to force my sister, he's just as bad as that guy from eighth grade—hell, that guy with Stacey. Sitting out in the yard with Stace, hearing her tell Kerry that…" He pressed his thumbs into his temples and struggled, "That what happened to _Alladola_ in eighth grade was sexual assault, and that my sister is a victim, and…and I want to know why I wasn't allowed to beat the ever-loving shit out of Jeff Schafer, okay?"

I opened my mouth, but Kerry mumbled, "He didn't—force me. He just tried to touch me. It wasn't like Mike, who was trying to rip my dress off. Jeff just…I told him stop, he tried again, and I just lost it. I punched him." Kerry unwound her hair from its braid, shaking the yellow rope free. "I know that if I had said no again, he would have pulled back again, and then he would have said again that I was a tease, and we would have argued, but he would have stopped. Instead, I just clocked him. I was so angry, I…"

Kerry slapped her eyes with the pockets of her palms. "I just…I'm a freak, and I know it," she blurted out. Her voice began to rise like steam, picking up energy and tears, hysterical and terrified, making my heart buckle. "I wake up at five in the morning, I run and do dry land, and then I drive all the way to Stamford, and I practice from six-fifteen until seven-thirty, and then I drive to Mercer for school, and then at three-fifteen, I'm back for practice until six, and then I do more dry land, and then I do my homework because I want to keep Papaw's car and be smarter than Laurel and all of the other cousins."

Kerry balled her hands in her hair and began to pull, hard, at the roots. "You know what they called me? They call me Mary Sue, because I got so good so fast, like it happens by magic. Getting this good. I gave up everything, _everything_, I gave up friends, I gave up hanging out on weekends because that's when I get to sleep and do schoolwork, I gave up everything, everything, to get this good. And I love to dive, I love to fly, but it's my entire life, guys, it's all I have."

Logan took her hands out of her hair and held them in his, all of their long fingers messing together. "I know, I know. I did it, too," he said. "I know what it's like to give up everything, bird, I know."

"Yeah, but you found Mary Anne," she cried. "And I'm all alone. No one understands what you have to give up to be the best, it's so lonely." Her face was swimming over with tears, and she wailed, "Some days, I feel like the only one who is with me is God. All I have is my faith, that's all. Because everyone thinks I'm a snob, everyone thinks I'm such a bitch because I don't have _time_ for them and stuff. All I have is Christ, and His words, and so now I'm not just Kerry the Icy Bitch, but I'm the Jesus freak, the Virgin Kerry." Through the gold sheet of her hair, her eyes slid between her brother and me. "I just wanted someone to touch me and see Kerry."

I ran a finger below her eyes, catching the water that was dripping down. "Oh, _Alladola_," I murmured. "We see you."

"But you won't take me on a date, will you? Not even that, you're not there. Maybe if you were around. But you're not," she whimpered. "I'm all by myself, and Dad keeps telling me that I have to be strong, stay the course, be a good soldier." She leaned the top of her head into Logan's chest. "Jeff held my hand when we watched over Mary Anne, he held my hand, and he let me cry. I haven't cried in so long, Lo, I swear."

"I know you haven't," he hushed, rubbing her back. "But honey, you have to be careful of who you open up to. Not everyone is someone you can trust."

Kerry shook her head. "He was always pushing, pushing for me to kiss him, to do stuff, and I just thought…this is someone who wants to be with me, maybe…maybe he'll get to know me? Like, if I kiss him, he'll want to get to know me. If I let him—if—" She pulled back from her brother and whispered into my ear, "If I let him put his hand up my shirt."

"What?" Logan asked, leaning forward, but I raised my eyebrows at him. No. He had to trust _me_. And he did, his face streaked with worry, but he rocked back on his pelvis and settled down again.

I let my eyes lock in with hers. "Kerry—back in high school, I would have done just about anything for my boyfriend Pete to love me. In the fall of junior year, I wanted more than just dating. I wanted love—and, okay, I'm not like you, I wanted to do stuff," I blushed. I waited for that heat to fade back before I admitted, "If Pete had said, I'll love you if you'll sleep with me—Kerry, I would have done it. No questions, I would have."

"You're better than that," Kerry sniffed.

"But I wanted to be loved," I answered. "Sweetie, I understand, wanting to be close to someone. I know what it's like to be lonely, I was lonely for so long. And to be desperate to make it stop. Logan, he's not like you and me. He can just disappear into basketball and books and be fine with it. Well, not fine, but functional. You and me…it begins to hurt so bad, I know," I sighed.

She swallowed, twisting her hands. "I asked him to come into the study, I started kissing him again, and I led him over to the mattress. And I liked it, I did, Mary Anne, he was kissing me so good, and when I—you know," Kerry bobbed her head, "that was so good, too, but I wanted what you get. When I'd come upstairs to use the bathroom late at night, I would pass by your bedroom, and I could hear you and Logan kissing, but you would be talking, too. I wanted to talk, but he didn't. He just wanted to hook up, and I started to get angry, and he kept trying to touch me, and it wasn't what I wanted, okay? Nothing below the belt, not with me—I didn't want it at all, not from some guy who didn't even want to hear the sound of my voice.

"I'd rather be alone than be with someone who was only looking for a warm body," Kerry breathed, leaning against me.

I rubbed my fingers through her hair—it reminded me so much of Dawn's old hair, but it was thick and wavy where hers was thin and straight, this huge gold weight on Kerry's back. Gold weight—she carried it every day, wanting to be the best. I glanced between her and her brother; what was it like to live their lives like this, constantly shoving their bodies towards greatness?

A year ago in late March, Logan had called me a few minutes before midnight. "Hey, we just landed—we'll be home in fifteen, twenty minutes," he said, each word mumbled with fatigue. With loss. His first season over in such a cloud of disappointment at the NCAAs. "You don't have to come—I know you have that thing, don't worry about it."

"Nice try," I answered, standing up from the desk in my room and grabbing my car keys. "I'll see you in fifteen, twenty minutes."

When I arrived, Veron's wife was sitting on the lawn next to the player's entrance to the arena, her baby laid out on the damp grass, his pudgy body rolling on a yellow blanket. I barely knew her—she had arrived, belly swollen with child, in January, the thick barrier of her language keeping her excluded from the rest of the circle of the team, the wives and girlfriends and friends who orbited them. Logan told me that she had been a nurse in Croatia, but here, all she could find was work as an orderly at their university's hospital.

"They want their baby to be an American citizen," he had shrugged when I asked why she would give up her life to come here, to just bear witness to her husband's career. "I guess that was enough of a reason."

"Hi, Szilvia," I smiled, tickling the baby as I sat down. "Goran looks so much bigger than he did at the Duke game."

"Is grow so fast," she sighed, pinching his toes through the pajamas' footies. "I am so sad at him getting big, too big for me to be ready for it." Her lip pushed out. "Veron so sad, is saying fault is all his for loss. I tell him he is very silly, yes, ehm, the game, not in last minute, game not one minute, is, ehm—" Frowning, she held her hands together and then pulled them apart, shaking them as she stared at me.

I nodded. "The game is forty minutes long, not just those last minutes. Yeah, I know."

Szilvia beamed at me. "Yes! He do not listen, never listen, he is man, that is them. You are very lucky Logan do not play much, less stress, less stupid saying things."

"I suppose," I said slowly, staring at the wriggling baby. "But he can then worry that he's not doing enough. He can always find something to be obsessed with."

She grew quiet for a moment, and I could see her stringing together a sentence, converting the words over in her head. "For some of them, it come easy, this is gift, is not much work to be so good, in whole country, they best. But for most of them? They give up so much, May. For Veron, is very dramatic, come from Europe—very much he give up, and he could have gone NBA, but he want college, think very important to do college. He like maths so much, college is such fun, yes? But him, others, your other: they give up so much for this. I wonder—how many feel empty tonight?"

The vans slowed on their way into the lot, and in a hush, the team filed off in their tracksuits, heads lowed, ears stuffed with headphones so they could be alone. Logan pulled the buds out of his ears, glancing at my car and then around until he found me. I smiled at Szilvia and stood up to meet him.

"Do you want to go back to your place? Or we can go to a hotel, if you want," I whispered, wrapping my arms around the slick fabric of his jacket.

"Come with me," he said, taking my hand and leading us to the door.

We snaked through the bowels of the stadium until we surfaced in the arena itself, walking onto the smooth wood of the court. He took me to the center, where the state had been painting in that lovely shade of light aquamarine they called Carolina blue. The color of the stone around my neck, the color of his eyes. We sat down on the star that denoted Chapel Hill, and he gathered me in his lap, resting his head on my shoulder as he stared at the floor.

"Ty's going to declare for the NBA once the season is over. Him, the other guard, Hicks—and we lose so many to graduation. This should have been it for us," he mumbled against my neck. "How many of those freakin' magazines said it was going to be us?"

I curled a hand around his face and rubbed his cheek, the blade of that bone hard against my fingers. He sighed, "Coach put his hand on my shoulder, he said, 'In 365 days, I want us preparing for the Elite Eight, not going home. Next year, you've gotta lead us there.' Because the Superstar is gone, it's gotta be me. I don't know if I'm good enough, pretty girl. I don't think I am. I don't think I can take all of the attention—I'm what the school paper said, I'm the white guy who gets off the bench, and in his five, ten minutes of playing, doesn't make you forget about the Superstar on his Gatorade break. I'm not good enough, Mary Anne."

Staring into the sink of his eyes, I stated, "First, the paper said you were the _hot_ white guy. Which I happen to agree with, totally," I grinned, kissing him on the chin and nose and lips. "Second, of course you don't make them forget about him. He's exactly what he is—a Superstar. But you, angel, you're incredible. Amazing. You're not him, but you said so yourself—no one is him, he's the very best. But it doesn't mean that you're not great, too. And, Logan, you're not expected to be alone—remember, a great point guard is an unselfish one, you told me that. You have to lead them when you guys are playing, but it's up to them to rise up, too."

The air out of his mouth was hot, splintered with mint. Did he brush his teeth at the airport, soothing himself with the pattern of the brush over his teeth? Making them right, making them clean. "Maybe I should have signed with a mid-major. Or a shitty school. Or a football school. Maybe it would be better there."

"Is that what you want?" I asked.

"No," he admitted. "It's just—all I can feel is pressure, Mary Anne. My chest feels so tight right now—there's just so much pressure, and it feels like it's packing up in my lungs."

I stared at the rows of empty seats, all in this same shade of blue; they rose up to the rafters like a wave of the sea, the blue beyond of it all. I had been here three times for games, this monstrous cavern of an arena throbbing with screams and chants and energy, vicious with people. Their hopes, their love, all arrowed down at the five men wearing their colors on this court. When he was on this wood, sneakers scuffing, feet pounding as he raced from one end to the other with his body hunkered down in a furious bundle of speed, he never noticed them. But then the horn would sound, and he would shuffle back to the bench and stare up at the crowd. Like he was surprised to find people on the other side of the thick black lines that rectangled off the area of play.

It was in that moment when he looked exhausted. And then he would step back beyond the lines and power around the court with the fire of a thousand houses ablaze.

I swallowed down my pity, my want to huddle him close to my body and stop talking, but he needed to hear me. Hear _this_. "Angel, think about the moment you first decided to do this. Give up everything else and not just do basketball, but be the best. What did that feel like?"

"Pressure," he answered.

"And?" I prompted.

"A challenge," Logan said. "I decided to compete with the entire world, and it was actually a relief. Because it seemed more possible to do that than compete with my dad."

"And you thrived," I added. "And now it's time to take this pressure and turn it into what you know. But you aren't competing with all of America right now. With thousands of unseen boys who might be and are better than you. You are competing with yourself, Logan, against your own insecurities. And you are not going to back down."

He had been watching me, silent and still, and he kept staring at me for long minutes after I had finished. Then I felt myself rising up off of the floor, kept safe in the pocket of his arms. He walked us through the tunnel that led to the locker rooms, a place he knew so well that he didn't touch the light switch when the door banged shut behind us, locking back into place and plunging the room into a velvet mass of darkness. I heard the jangle of his key again, like the bells tied to horses at Christmastime, as we stopped in front of another door. Once was passed through it, he dropped our bags to the ground and bolted it shut before laying me on top of a table, thick and soft with foam held into place with terry cloth. Soft as my breathing.

Not his, heavy and tripping, the sound of his mouth opening but not making speech. "It's okay, you don't have to talk," I whispered as he pressed his body on top of mine.

Again, his mouth opened, and I could hear the mechanics of voice in his throat trying to put his thoughts into words. "Yes," I told him. I answered. I wanted.

I waited for the feel of his hands on the button of my pants, the crackle of the zipper on his jacket, but there was still silence. Then: "How do you see me so well?"

In the darkness, he was a blot of a shadow, the sculpt of his body delicate against the heavy night. But he glowed—his heart was a candle. I smiled at the shape of my lover, my love, and put my hand against his cheek. "Because you're my Logan, that's why."

I had him. We were not alone.

His fingers found the button on my jeans, my hands worked his zipper down, and we lay on a table that, in less than a year, would hold his broken body. That six months after that would cradle him when he had nowhere else to go, sobbing himself into sleep because I had shoved him away.

But that night, I held him close, I whispered his name like a psalm, I tucked him deep inside of me, and when I ran my hands over his shoulders, they were at rest—without the weight of the world on his body, without the weight of himself.

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We sat with Kerry for twenty minutes as she cried, over everything she had sacrificed—but not Jeff. It was never about Jeff. He could have been any guy. I stroked her hair and kissed her crown, the broken little bird of my new sister.

"Do you want to stop diving?" I asked, trying to keep my words gentle. "Or cut back a bit? I mean, you're going to a new city, a new school—you can start over, Kerry."

"If you don't want to do this, _Alladola_, you can stop. If it's too much, and no one is going to judge you," Logan said, tucking a bit of her hair behind her ear.

"Yes, they will," she spat, and her words looked like her father.

Logan took in an angry breath. "Well, _I_ won't judge you, and I'll stand up for you. I'll be with you all week, right—I'm not going to Lou to look at houses, I'm coming to be with you and Hunt. We can sit down and talk to Dad this week, and I will support you absolutely."

She swallowed, glancing over at the slow meander of the dark river, the lazy whorl of its water. "No, I don't want to give it up. I love it, I do. It just—sometimes I realize just how much I've given up."

I looked over her head, the lean of her body into her brother, and caught his gaze. "Logan told me a long time ago that lots of people could be really great athletes. But what stops them is not necessarily dedication, but balance. You have to have an imbalance in your life to be great—unless you are just naturally super-talented, it takes a lot of work to be the best, and you have to sacrifice a lot to put in the kind of work that it takes to be elite. Like my friend Stacey—she's naturally a math genius, but she puts in tons of hours at the library because she's trying to discover a new economics theory or something."

"But Stacey's on dance team at her college, Stacey does student activities—I saw her photo album, she's got lots going on," Kerry protested.

"It's harder in high school," Logan replied. "A lot of things overlap with training. In college, it gets more spread out. And Stacey does a lot, but Stacey is _busy_. And some people thrive on busy, others don't. Davis? Davis hates busy. I don't mind busy as long as I get to sleep on Sundays. I mean, bird, I work out and practice four to five hours a day, two to three hours of class each day, four to five hours of homework at study tables, and then some days, a couple of hours with the pre-dental honor society or with Student Government or community service. That's it. That's all I can handle. Basketball, school, and two activities. End." He gave me a sad look and added, "And at the end of the day, I try to see Mary Anne, but sometimes I'm too tired. Or Shawn doesn't want her to stay over—and it's so not fair to her to have her drive to _me_ all the time like I ask."

I smiled at him, meeting his hand on top of Kerry's back. "I'm so glad that we're living together—now I'll get to see you every day."

He beamed at me, squeezing my fingers, but then pulled back and grabbed a stick. "Okay, Ker, this is a magic wand. By the power vested in me by being awesome, I can grant you any three wishes. What are they?"

She closed her eyes. "I want to win Nationals and go to the Olympics." Her eyes popped open and narrowed. "Can that be one wish?"

"Sure," he shrugged, tapping her on the head with the branch.

"I want to be a pilot," she continued, and he touched her with the stick again. Kerry wriggled her mouth back and forth and then sighed. "I want to have someone who understands all of this—like, not a boyfriend, but someone who'd take me out on dates and whatever. Just understand."

I tilted her head up to look at me. "Kerry, remember what I told you when you first came to Carolina? About relaxing? I love who you are, I think you're incredible, and I don't want you to lose that amazing focus and drive and all. But you've got to not be so quick to bat people away. You get what you give, sis. And if you give out rejection from someone's second sentence, if you judge them so quick, then they'll judge you right back. Give a person three hours before you decide they're wasting your time."

"Dad is a very good man," Logan said quietly, putting the stick in his lap. "But he's a hard man. The only thing that makes him soft is Mom. I don't—do you know what begrudge means? Okay, then I don't begrudge you for wanting to be like Dad, I don't, but Kerry, you don't have much softness that you let the world see. And it's really tough to get to know someone who's always on full combat. Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne's old friend? She was like that. And it was always really tough for her to make new friends because she was so strident."

"Kristy's working for Senator Liebermann—the _Gazette_ said so," Kerry sniffed, wiping her eyes. "That's not too shabby, huh?"

I bit my lip and nodded. "Well, yes, see, Kristy's totally successful. And she seems to be very happy. But this is the thing—you can either be tough like you are, like Kristy, and accept the fact that you're gonna have a hard time with other people as you rise to the top, _or_ you change a little to let others in." I waved my hand in front of me. "If you want to be like Kristy, she and Dawn still talk, I can get you her number, and I'm sure she'd love to chitchat with you about her life and stuff. But it seems like you don't want to be like her, but you're just scared to change. And it's okay—growing up is scary. I'm still scared." I let my hands drop down like leaves. "I'm still trying to grow."

"You never stop growing up, Kay. Not when you graduate high school, not when you graduate college. You're always growing up—you're never stuck in the same person for your whole life. Know what you want, and then become the kind of person so you can make that happen," Logan declared, tugging on her hair.

She nodded for a minute and then stopped, twisting around so that her body met her brother's. "Thank you, Loey. I love you."

"I love you, too, Kay," he said, tipping his forehead down on her shoulder. After a moment, he shifted his face up to look at me. _And you, too,_ he mouthed.

I reached forward and traced a heart on his cheek before pulling back to clap my hands. "So!" I chirped. "Do you guys want to finish lunch here?"

Kerry wiped at her eyes and stared at her barely eaten sandwich. "Can we eat in the car? I just want to get home." She gasped, grabbing a handful of Logan's shirt. "Did Daddy tell you? The Keaton house just came on the market—they got a divorce, and he's moving to Omaha, and she's going back to Bowling Green."

"With the lake view and the little round thingie?" Logan exclaimed, bouncing on his heels. "I love that house—that's our house, for sure, end of discussion. Tomorrow, I think we should see it, and then have Dad buy it. That moment."

I smiled at the two of them as we repacked the cooler. "Honestly, I cannot believe your parents are trusting the three of you to look at houses."

"Whatever, Dad's all upset that Mom wants to look at houses in Anchorage," Kerry sniffed. "He knows that we want to go back to Belknap, so he figures four against one will rule the day. I think Mom's just trying to be contrary—she thinks it's funny when Daddy gets all flustered."

"My parents, they're so functional," Logan rolled his eyes, grabbing the cooler and taking my hand as we walked back to the car.

"Can we put the top down? It's so gorgeous, and you know that once we start moving through Kentucky, it's gonna smell so good—all of the grass and the hay," Kerry wheedled, grabbing the canvas sides of the car.

I leaned against his arm. "Oh, that sounds nice, do you mind?"

"If it doesn't bother you at all, I think that's a great idea," he grinned, helping Kerry take off the cover of the car and folding it into a large lump that they wedged in the small trunk space. "You know, Kay, we haven't played the traditional West Virginia song yet."

She clapped a hand over her mouth. "You're right! Oh, my God, we so have to—when we get to the three mile marker, we gotta cue it up." Kerry jumped into the backseat and tapped my shoulder. "Okay, so, Logan says you're really into rhetoric and stuff? So, back me up on this interpretation. John Denver sings about 'country roads take me home to the place I belong,' right? Now, everyone things it's about West Virginia, but _I_ argue that it's really about Kentucky—leaving this stupid state and going home to Bluegrass Country. The images can all apply to Kentucky, _and_, and! Mountain mamas can be, like, in the Cumberlands or something. It's not clear. Do you agree?"

I rubbed my chin in mock thought. "Weeell…it does clash with the traditional paradigm of interpretation, and the author may disagree with this view—"

"He's dead, he doesn't get a say," Kerry said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

"Still," I continued, trying to brush the unease of that sentence off of my mind, "I think you can argue about the ambiguity of the images, but…Kerry, the first line is 'Almost heaven, West Virginia.' There's only so much rhetorical twisting you can do."

"Yeah, well, they are _almost _heaven—Kentucky is heaven," Kerry crowed, punching the air with her fists as we made our way back to the freeway. We rode in silence for ten minutes until Kerry leapt over the front seat, her feet dangling in the rush of the wind as she jammed a CD into the player. As the player chugged, she slammed her fist on the dashboard until it caught hold of the disc and began pouring out a John Denver song that made the three of us blanch.

"Though I do like 'Rocky Mountain High,'" Logan noted as Kerry skipped through the tracks. "I'd think about the University of Colorado, if Mary Anne wanted go to there. On one hand—snow. On the other hand—mountains. Mountains are pretty sweet." He reached over and rubbed the mounds of my knuckles with his thumb. "I liked them mountains in Arizona a lot, all purple and covered in cacti."

Kerry smacked her fist against his arm. "The Air Force Academy is in Colorado! If you guys went there, and I went there? It would be so cool!"

"It's a long ways off, Kay," I said, giving her a patient look. "We're still trying to decide if it makes more sense to stay in Carolina so Logan can go to dental school."

"No, we're not," he protested. "You go first."

"Yeah, but they're practically saving a seat for you," I pressed. "It doesn't make sense to leave for five years to come _back_. Besides," I continued, taking his hand and pressing it on my belly, "I might want to stay at home. We'll stretch your student loans like rubber bands, live in a crappy flat and eat Ramen noodles. No matter what, we'll make it work."

"Daddy said, all you two have to do is ask, and they'll give you money," Kerry said with an aggravated huff of air. "He says that doesn't understand why you two want to struggle when they're willing to help. Why won't you just ask for help?"

Because Logan doesn't want to be obligated to his father like that. Just like a small part of me—the part that is petty and bitchy and tar-covered seething with anger—wishes my father wasn't paying my medical bills. The terror on Logan's face as he sat down with Stacey to make a budget where he and I were responsible for paying for it all slammed into me like a canon's blast, and he nearly cried in relief when he saw the first insurance bill, already marked _Paid_. But still, despite that, despite it all: part of me wishes that Dad wasn't paying because then he could be out of my life.

The way he wants to be. What keeps him paying? Mere obligation? Sharon? Is Sharon telling him to?

Or does he want me to live?

Is this how he tells me that he still loves me?

Logan's hand was solid on my stomach, and I wondered about this baby. Boy? Girl?

I once had a son named Richard. Did Dad know?

The music blasted to life, and Kerry was still leaning between Logan and I, her head bobbling back and forth while the wind spun her hair in a wheat-colored tornado. She and her brother began singing in a loud, almost tuneless way, and I could almost see their whole family driving in the car from Louisville to Huntington to see a football game, to go to the ocean in Virginia, playing this song as they crossed the state border. A family. A family with problems and issues and strife, but in that moment, they were so close, they shared the same excited, joyous air. Logan's hand was still on me, and I held tight to his wrist. I wanted that for us.

As the chorus began, we raced over the state line, Kerry screaming, "'Take me home, country roads.'" I laughed at the two of them, as Kerry reached across her brother to blare the horn with an eager hand. She scooted back into her seat as we approached a Kentucky state patrol car parked in the median; she gave him a big wave, holding her University of Kentucky shirt as we passed by. I could see the officer wave back, the man's head bouncing with laughter.

"'Drivin' down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday—yesterday,'" Kerry belted out, and she hopped up onto the backseat and clutched to the metal cross bar arching over the frame of the car. Her hair whipped behind her like a sheet as she closed her eyes and sang, "To the place I belong."

We were taking her home. I looked away from her, from her brother trying to shoo her back down to her seat, and sank down inside of myself. Below the depression, below the cancer, below the baby, down to where the roots of myself still were.

I closed my eyes and though of myself, of Mary Anne, and I felt it. Home.

I would go home again.

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"You know what I've been thinking about?" Logan asked, speeding us down I-57.

"I'm almost scared to ask," I grinned, resting my head on his shoulder, staring at the road ahead—it had been almost four hours since we left Kerry behind in Louisville at their father's work, and it was a relief to just be together, without anyone else. I missed being alone with him—we'd have to make some us time when I got back.

"Shift into third," he said, and I grabbed the stick nestled next to my right leg and changed gears. "I've been thinking—okay, so after graduation, you still want the big fancy wedding, right?"

"Yes," I declared. "Hell yes. Big white dress, bad dancing—I want my wedding. And call me superficial, but I want the presents. Did you see what Stacey bought us at Williams-Sonoma?"

He raised his eyebrows and glanced at me. "No. What? When?"

"On Monday. She bought us a panini sandwich thingie," I announced, rubbing his thigh.

"That's hot," he replied.

"Well, yes. Since it's a grill and all," I nodded.

His laughter roared against the pull of the wind, collapsing into snorts after a minute. "For Christ's sake, Mary Anne," he snickered, sneaking a kiss on my forehead. "Anyway, so! This is my great idea. For a honeymoon, we pack ourselves some backpacks—"

"And if there is a baby? Does baby get a backpack?" I prompted.

"Baby can go spend some quality time with Grandma Sharon," he sniffed. "Anyway! So. We get ourselves some portable luggage, we go to Denmark, we take the boat to Sweden, and we—"

"Go to Finland? Finland again!" I howled, flopping back on the empty passenger seat, dissolving into laughter. I squirmed against the lap belt as I collapsed into hysterics. "You and Finland, seriously, Logan, it's pathological!"

"I want to know the truth!" he demanded, thumping the steering wheel so hard that the horn bleated. "They never say what happened there, it's all so secret—all you get are those damned diagonal lines that say that Finland belonged to Russia during the Second World War. I mean, honestly, what happened? Did Hitler and Stalin sit around in a bunker, pushing a bottle of vodka back and forth as they said, 'No, _you_ take Finland.' 'No, dude, _you_ take Finland.' 'No, it's cool, it's chalk full of Aryan master race breeding folk, _you_ can have Finland.' 'Seriously, Joe, _you_ can have Finland. We'll take Poland. I gots some plans for Poland, we're gonna use it like a workroom. Finland's all you.' What _happened_ to Finland!"

"See, I'm more curious about Sweden. It's Ground Zero of the Aryan race, it's Hitler's Blonde Ambition wet dream, how come he just ignored them—and honestly, was he that stupid to not know that all of the Danish Jews were totally hauling ass over there? What made Sweden so special?" I countered.

Logan waved his hand in the air. "Details. I want to know about Finland. Land of Secrets. It's like Stacey, in country form. No! It's like _me_, as a nation. Hidden, quiet, don't notice the other Scandinavian country. Go play in Norway and shit, leave us alone. Mary Anne, I'm going to Finland, and they are going to tell me their evil Finnish secrets if it kills me. And them. What are they hiding in those fjords, huh?"

"Fjords are Norway," I giggled.

"I was trying to be poetic," he insisted. He gasped, wheeling his head to stare at me. "Maybe they have gnomes. Maybe that's what they're hiding. Moose and little gnomes. Maybe that's what the Russians were after—gnome power."

"Gnomes? Logan, seriously, get real." I twisted the earring in my left ear and stated, "Finland is obviously hiding Santa Claus."

"Yes," he breathed. "Yes, that must be it. And the Russians knew about it, so they invaded because Santa Claus threatened the communist ideal, only going to the Christian houses. Not very socialist, that Santa."

"In Soviet Russia, Christmas celebrates you," I intoned, striking my fist in the air.

He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. "We need to go to Finland."

"You know, nothing is stopping you from just going—you have plenty in the bank to go off on a year-long Finlandian exploration," I noted. "You could become a moose whisperer."

Shaking his head, Logan insisted, "Pretty girl, you are essential to the trip. Come on—on your dad's side? Norwegian and Danish? Tess, you _are_ them. You can throw down the Scandinavian heritage card and unlock their dirty secrets. You can exchange knitting with them and get to the bottom of things." He shrugged. "And if that fails, you're gonna seduce them."

"Am I?" I scoffed.

He turned us off the freeway for the Carbondale exit. "Yes. Honestly, I have no clue why the CIA hasn't snatched you up yet, our secret sexy weapon. Deploying you to uncover terrorist plots with the flash of those legs. I very rightly believe, had they sent you over to North Korea two years ago, that stand-off never would have happened."

"What, I would have made sweet sweet love to Kim Jong Il and stolen the nuclear codes?" I grinned.

"Probably not that sweet—more like two minutes and kind of uncomfortable. I bet he cries afterwards," he said, cackling back into laughter.

I sat back up and nudged against him, giving him a sharp poke in the ribs. "Uh, _you've _cried."

"You bit me!" he protested. "That hurt like a motherfucker, you vicious minx."

I snapped my teeth like J.D. and laughed again into his neck as we passed by a never-ending collage of strip malls and chain restaurants. "Is this Carbondale?" I asked, looking at the directions I had copied from Sean's email.

"Don't we have to drive another fourteen miles? Maybe this is the commercial area," he shrugged, still heading west. We passed over a large lake, and I pressed my hands over the ledge of the passenger door, gazing at the water bouncing back the slowly reddening sky. A few minutes later, a sign declared our welcome to Carbondale, and I craned my neck to find the university. From what Flynn had said, the entire town was Southern Illinois, but I didn't see it yet.

We headed into a small town square, parking by the organic Co-op that Flynn worked at. Before we crossed the street, I yanked on Logan's hand. "Do I look okay? I haven't seen them in three years, I want to look nice."

"I'm kinda biased," he smiled, but I held a pleading look until he reached over and straightened the ribbon I was using like a headband. I smoothed my hands down the front of the brown and orange patterned dress that Stacey and Dawn had picked out, billowing over the bump of my stomach. He gave me two solemn thumbs up, and I let out a loud sigh, slipping my hand back into his.

The moment we stepped inside the store, Logan let out a snort. "Dawn heaven," he said, thumbing at the aisles of food, the musty scent of beans and rice and coffee mingling in the air. I turned around in a circle until I saw Flynn, her dark hair swinging around her neck, the small hazel eyes catching my face.

"You're here!" she squealed, running from behind the cash register to squeeze me in a hug. "You're a bit early, I didn't expect you guys—my shift ends in twenty minutes, but I'll call Sean, get him over here, okay?"

"Okay," I said, grinning back as she patted Logan's back. "Should we just hang out here?"

"No, go next door to that coffee shop, Longbranch, I'll have Seanie meet you there. Be warned—he's blonde now. He had a run in with some peroxide, and it wasn't very pretty," she said, rolling her eyes.

She waved us goodbye, shuffling back to the register. We only had to wait fifteen minutes next door when Sean burst in, his head a mess of near-white locks straightened into a maze of spikes. He came over to me and held me tight in his arms.

"You look so good," I whispered, kissing his cheek.

"You look great, too," he said back. "You'll get through this, I swear." He ran a finger under my tearing eyes, and then turned to grin at Logan. "You stuck! We tried our damnedest to scare you off, you know."

"That Kathleen, she's a terror," Logan said, narrowing his eyes. They did that strange half-hug backslap that guys do, and I had that moment I did when Logan was next to another man—realizing just how big he really was. Was it shallow that I loved that? Was it shallow that it made me feel safe?

Sean went over to the counter to get a drink, flopping into a chair across from me. "Well, I just caught a call from the lovely Kath—she and Allison are about three hours into their train ride from Chicago. They'll be here later, but they are on their way." He raised his eyebrows at Logan as he blew on the hot steam of coffee. "You staying the night?"

Shrugging, Logan said, "It's only four hours back home, no big. My sister's having a bad day, and I think she needs me—I mean, I hate to seem rude, but if you guys wouldn't mind—"

"Shoving the chit-chat and getting down to business?" Sean supplied. "Of course not. Once Flynn gets here, we'll get you two up to speed on everything, and then you can get going." He poked my arm. "Dude, we were thinking…ribs for dinner, over in Murphysboro? Great Memphis style meat, you'll never want to leave. You'll understand that we really know how to make our food sing up here."

I laughed, stirring the tea in my cup, punching down at the bag of herbs. "I'm really excited to have a reunion—I only wish Dana would have come."

"Oh, well, Dana's living in a land where she was never sick. The girl is just—whatever," Sean rolled his eyes. "She doesn't want to face what happened, and I honestly don't want to hang out with someone who refuses to deal with a huge part of who they are. I had cancer, I'm a proud survivor, fuck anyone who thinks that makes me scary or anything bad. It all comes from a place of fear. And Tim taught me to be fearless."

"I wish Tim was here," I sighed. "I know he'd tell me to tell cancer to sod off or something ridiculous, something that I need to really get raging at this whole thing."

"Just put in _Blackadder_. We'll watch it tonight. It's almost as good as Timmy himself and without the inappropriate comments to your girl about his desire to shag her sweet ass," Sean smarmed, checking the door. He looked at Logan and winced. "Sorry about the NCAAs. Hey, we got bounced in the Elite Eight, too."

"And that almost makes me feel better," he replied, scrunching his nose back.

"What, does it bruise your ego to be on the same level as the pitiful mid-major? I say, on behalf of the entire student body here at SIU—suck it, ACC," Sean declared, thumping his fist on the table. His face reddened as he glanced at me. "Though, uh, Duke kinda did good."

"Yeah, that little thing called making the finals," I cackled, clapping my hands. "2009-10 is our year, I can feel it. Bank on it, boys, it's our time."

They stared at each other for a moment. "She's delusional," Sean sighed.

Logan nodded. "It's the chemo. It makes her crazy. Crazy pregnant lady."

I threw my stir stick at Sean, and he grinned back at me. "So. Can I ask you some questions first?" I bobbed my head, and he started, "As of right now, you don't know if the baby is a match."

"No—the amnio is in a week, and they'll do the HLA tests. We're optimistic that the baby will be as close as a full-sibling match because—well, senior year, my sister and her friend Kristy did a bone marrow drive, and Logan matches my protein markers, what is it, a fifty percent match?" I replied, turning to my husband.

"Fifty-two. Though there were several other kids who had higher marker matches with her, but that's not bad," Logan shrugged.

Sean let out a whistle. "That's really good. That could be up to a three-fourths match, that's better than some blood siblings. But you have to worry about a gene defect?"

"Yeah—so we have to cross two hurdles. The HLA match, and then making sure that the baby's chromosome seventeen is intact. It's almost easier if it's a boy because then we don't have to worry about a breast cancer deformity. But, we'll see," I sighed, sipping my tea. The hot drink was soothing, beating down against the strange nausea that lived in my body after each treatment.

Sean's eyes slid between Logan and me. "Do you care if it's a boy or a girl?"

"I just want it to be a match," Logan mumbled, turning his mug around in his hands, rotating the handle from palm to palm. "I just want it to be right."

After clearing his throat, Sean leaned back in his chair. "You're having the transplant done at Duke?"

"They have a full transplant center there—I took a tour last week, it's really fancy, of course," I said with a wry roll of my eyes. "My stepmom wants me to go back to Yale, but…I have a great support system in Durham. Not so much in New Haven."

"Good. You'll need it," Sean stated, his mouth growing tight. "If everything goes perfect, what's the timeline?"

Logan grabbed my wrist. "If we say it out loud, we're probably cursing everything to go wrong."

"Or, we're saying it out loud to make it happen," I amended, taking his hand and pressing it against my heart. "The baby is due in mid-December, after finals. So, ideally, I finish first semester, have the baby, take a week to rest, and then begin the transplant. I've already talked with my advisor about taking winter semester off, or maybe doing an independent study. We'll see. That's so far off, we're not going to worry about it yet."

Sean frowned at us and took in a sharp breath. "Leaving Logan to take care of the baby by himself? In the middle of the season?"

"My sister might take off time from school—she was thinking first semester, but I think I might need her more second semester. Dawn's trying to write a book about Vista, and she's thinking about just buckling down and finishing it, so we'll see. That, and my stepmom and his mom are both volunteering to come down and stay with us for awhile," I began.

"And my coach and I talked about me taking off December to be with Mary Anne and the baby. Or at least not travel with the team to away games. Worse comes to worse, I sit out, I apply for a redshirt. My team understands. Mary Anne's got to live, and that requires sacrifice," Logan murmured, wrapping his arm around my shoulders.

"No," I snapped. "Sharon and your mom and I won't let you. Your mom said she'd take care of December, and Sharon says the market slows down in January, so she can take time off then. You are not stopping playing, do you hear me?" I whipped a finger at Sean. "You're my witness. I don't want him to stop playing, understand?"

Sean laughed, pretending to write on his palm. "I'll get the barista to notarize it." He sat up straight as Flynn walked into the shop, waving as she went over to the counter, ordering a drink. When she sat down, she kissed Sean with her hands on his face, the tiny stone on her ring finger winking in the amber light of the room. "Logan's heading back home to Louisville, so we need to get right to the bones of it all, so to speak."

"Transplants are hell on earth," Flynn said bluntly. "But they can save your life. Six in one, half dozen in the other."

Sean sighed, giving her a hard look. "Why don't we start at the beginning?"

"Can I ask you something?" Logan blurted out. "It's not about transplants at all."

They exchanged a look. "Sure," Flynn said in a long drawl.

"Has it been hard, adjusting to life with him being well? I mean, from what Mary Anne has told me, Sean has been sick on and off the whole time that you two have been together. And now he's all better—has that been hard at all, to get used to that?" Logan asked, tightening his hand on my shoulder.

After a moment, they began laughing. "What's so funny?" I replied.

Flynn wiped her eyes. "Oh, guys—Sean and I have _both_ been sick. We met at the Yale hospital when he was in eighth grade and I was in ninth. We were sharing an English tutor. He had cancer, I had CF—cystic fibrosis. I still do. Sean's all better, but I could still die tomorrow." She clapped her hands together, rubbing them so fast that her skin squealed. "Just because he doesn't have cancer doesn't mean that he might not die—car accident, lightning strike, death by rabid squirrels…" Her hands kept slipping back and forth. "We had to accept our own mortality before we could even drive. And the fact that death isn't looming over him like a hand anymore—doesn't mean much. Means we don't have to live in a hospital every two years. Which is nice."

Sean put his hand below the table, and I could see her smile as his hand pressed on her body. "Let's walk them through this."

Flynn pushed up her sleeves and circled her hands in front of her chest, her perfect chest. "From the moment you start the high-dose treatment, you are looking at a year. A year until your body settles down. It's a full year, May—and for the first three to six months, your entire life revolves around that transplant, around your weak body. The last six months, you're beginning to get your life back. But the first six are tough—and the first six weeks are murder."

"The first thing they do is harvest the stem cells—from the cord and the placenta. They'll put it on ice, and you go into the conditioning regiment: imagine the hardest, most brutal chemo you've ever gotten in your life, and over the span of three days, they just hammer you with it," Sean continued, slamming his hands together. I winced as he said, "They are kinda clearing out your body, just sweeping everything out of the way—any remaining cancer, but more importantly, they're killing off all of the cells in your bone marrow. So that the new cells can take hold. It's designed to kill, May, and it feels like it."

Flynn tipped her head. "It did for Sean, it might not for you—they'll give you anti-emetic drugs to control the side effects, but those will totally zonk you out. They didn't work so well with Seanie, but they might with you."

"Probably? Since the transplant is half _his_ cells," Sean said, pointing at Logan, "they'll give you transfusions of his blood, to prep your body. And then more transfusions from him once the transplant is over."

"The transplant is _such_ a let down," Flynn sighed, and Sean nodded, slumping onto her shoulder. "After those three days, you're so ready for something big and dramatic! And it looks and feels like a blood transfusion, doesn't it, baby?"

"So boring, I wanted a refund," he announced. "At least I wanted some flashing lights, a balloon drop. Something."

Flynn waved at her tongue, glaring at her cup of coffee. "Annawah," she said, breathing over her scalded tongue.

Sean grinned at her. "Anyway. The first week, not so bad, I guess. You get platelet and blood transfusions because you'll get anemic. And you'll get growth hormone injections to stimulate the cells taking hold. It takes two to four weeks for the cells to really start growing, so you have to be really patient."

I glanced up at Logan, my eyes swimming. "I'm still back on this being an entire year."

He gave me a small smile before glancing back at the two of them. "So. When do the side-effects start?"

"You will be exhausted—for weeks, just so damned tired. Anemic, you'll probably lose your appetite, you might get mouth infections and thrush—it's really important to keep your mouth clean because of all of the bacteria that can grow there," Sean pressed.

Logan and I laughed. "That we can do," I said, grabbing my tea.

Sean raised his eyebrows at Flynn, and shrugged. "Anyway. Because your immune system is just pancaked by the anti-rejection drugs and the just waste of your rebuilding body, you are so vulnerable to infection. I had a really bad one in week three, it left me unconscious for four days, and my fever was at brain-boiling levels. Just scary stuff. But, it's part of the deal. You're gonna get an infection, May. Count on it."

I shivered, staring at his hard eyes. Flynn put her hand on his shoulder. "It's just—the question is, can you fight it off or not. A big part of it is not flipping out each time you run a fever or get ill. It's gonna happen, nobody makes through this perfectly. Stay calm through it all. Especially if you get graft-versus-host disease."

"That's where…the transplant attacks your body's healthy cells," I said slowly, sliding my eyes between them.

Flynn nodded. "Sean had it real mild—a bad rash, for about a week. But nothing too memorable—you might, since this isn't as close as of a match as he had from his brother. But he had graft-versus-disease, which is really good. Your new cells attack any remaining cancer—Sean made remission while in treatment for the transplant. That was a real bonus."

"So, okay," Logan said, spreading his hands down on the table. "GvH disease, infection, the possibility of bleeding out, too, right—what else can go wrong?"

"Everything," Sean murmured, staring at me.

Flynn tapped my hand. "Listen. You can read all of this. What you really need to know is how it feels to live this. For you, May, it's going to be so lonely. For you, Logan, it's going to be hideously frustrating. May will have days where she can barely be awake, she'll have days where you are certain she'd be happier if she was dead, and all you can do is just sit there in a stupid hospital gown with a stupid mask on your face and gloves on your hands and do nothing."

She ran her hands through her hair, pulling the mass back in her fist. "For the first few weeks, until the transplant takes hold, you have to gown up—it takes forever to get sterilized, to get dressed, to cover up completely. And if you have a cold, forget being let in. And if you get frustrated, the nurses…well, they are patient, but if you lose your temper about the whole bullshit, they'll start questioning whether you can really be a good support, be what your love needs."

"For way too long, you can't kiss," Sean said, his mouth slumping. "No kissing. No touching unless through rubber gloves. I missed the feel of skin so bad, and nobody was allowed to touch me. You get so lonely—your friends may not have the time to do the whole gown deal, but it's nice when people just stand outside of the window and wave. But it gets so lonely in there."

"And you feel so helpless," Flynn whispered. "And the days that they won't let you in, you just want to die."

They were our mirror. They had been together for so long, marrying so quick, under the shadow of an illness, of a want, just the two of them. But they had made it through, they were here, happy and together and healthy. As healthy as they both could be, their illnesses tucked away for the moment. This could be us—survivors. This could be us, on the other side. My left hand drifted up to my shoulder and met his, our rings clicking as our fingers slid together, and we balled that part of our bodies together so tight, as if we would never let go.

"I could die during this," I managed, licking my lips to ease those words out. "I might get cancer again despite this, and I might die during it, too."

Flynn blinked. "Yes. But May—I've been in two clinical trials with some of the most batshit treatments for CF ever invented, but I do it—not because it's a cure, but because the longer I live, the longer I can last until they _do_ cure it. Same with this. A transplant is no guarantee, it's not a magic cure, okay? But it gives you something that's so precious, as precious as life itself. It gives you time, May. All of this—it gives you time."

She took a deep breath and turned to face her husband, her thumb circling over his cheek. "Sometimes—it only gives you the time to say goodbye."


	24. Chapter 21: Logan

For oneoneohohone, who made this chapter _happen_ (well, she makes all the chapters happen, let's be real)—she wanted something to read after work tonight and fed me all of the info. Some dialogue from this chapter comes from book 25, _Mary Anne and the Search for Tigger _by Ann M. Martin, in the following scenes: BSC phone call, Saturday phone call, ransom note call, hanging of posters, and someone saying they love the dentist (dork).

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Mary Anne walked me back to the car, raising our clasped hands over her mouth as she yawned. "Are you sure you don't want to come back to Sean and Flynn's and have a nap with me?" she asked.

"I'm sure—honestly, I'm not tired. And the drive is so boring, it's easy. Though I might stop in Santa Claus, Indiana? See if, like, they have any information on how he's being held hostage," I said, narrowing my eyes towards the east. Damn Finnish.

"Seriously, Logan," she laughed, knocking into me. She bit on her lip and slid her eyes from side to side. "They really scared me with the transplant talk."

"Me, too," I admitted, taking her other hand. "But you still want to do it, right?"

"Yeah," she stated. "If it's a match, I have to."

"Good, that's what I think, too," I said, my stomach bleating a bit in worry. At this moment, there were four ways for Mary Anne to die staring us right in the face: the cancer. This eclampsia thing with her pregnancy. The transplant. And then maybe something we hadn't thought of at all. I wrapped her hands around my waist and bent down to kiss her head. Why is this happening to us?

Because we are strong enough to take it. She had said that once.

"So," Mary Anne announced, tugging on my shirt. "I have a present for you."

"Do you?" I grinned, stepping over to the car to pull out her suitcase and her purse. Presents: score. She grabbed her bag and tugged out a wrapped gift, a large rectangle covered in paper the color of my sister and her sister's hair, a whirl of different colored golds.

She stuck out her tongue a little and wrinkled her nose. Could she be any prettier than when she was just like this, her teasing, relaxed self? I hoped that this was the sign she was coming back from her depression—it seemed easier for her to be like this.

"So, originally? I thought that I would give this to you as part of our anniversary extravaganza," she said with a grin. "Two months are so much more important than one. Since there are two of us."

And I had been working so much at the clinic, and she had been so sad and tired, that first month barely registered. I winced, but she continued, "But I have so many ideas for that day, and I figured that you might miss me this week."

I shrugged, "Nah. Not much at all." Just every minute, especially at night, when I would cross my arms and find nothing there.

"Oh, well, then never mind," she said, shaking her head and holding the gift against her chest. I pushed out my lower lip, letting out a small whimper, and she laughed. "Okay, I suppose."

"Should I open it now?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Whenever you need it. I bet you'll know when."

I noticed Sean and Flynn stepping across the street, their gazes everywhere but on us. We were running out of time, and Mary Anne needed to lie down before the rest of their night. I set the gift on the hood of the car and cradled her face in my hands while her fingers slipped against my shoulder blades, urging me down to her. I kissed her, over and over, so strange for her to not be shy about something like this anymore, unlike how it had been when we first started dating back in middle school. She pulled me close and kissed my shirt, right over my heart and pressed her ear there.

"Have fun with your friends," I told her, letting my nose touch hers.

"Have fun picking out a fabulous house and stretching out at the lake," Mary Anne smiled. "If your dad gets on you, nothing says you have to stay, okay?"

"Okay," I nodded. "Want me to call when I get to the Lou?"

"Yes, please," she replied. "I love you," she added.

"I love you, too." I touched my lips against my fingers and rubbed her stomach before I walked around the car to get back in the driver's seat, to leave her here. She waved at me as I pulled into the street and turned left, and then right, back onto the road out of town.

We said that so easily, _I love you_. When was the first time I said it to her? In the hospital room, laying on a futon as she wore that red dress, the red dress she wore when I married her.

No. Before that. In eighth grade, I said it, too. But she had said it first, two weeks before me. I had been so blown away, so rocketed by that, I wasn't sure what to say other than _pretty girl_. She gave me her love, I gave her a name. It took me way too long to say it back. But that one week before I said it. That week. It was the first time that she and I had gone through a bad problem, the beginning of us not communicating well. Of me shutting things inside, of her not saying what she should. Of me, seeing myself in my father's reflection and hating what I saw: him.

It was the first time that I thought that maybe, maybe, I wanted a life that had nothing to do with where Lyman had stood first.

And all I needed was for Mary Anne to have the worst thing in her life happen to her. Or so she claimed it was at the time.

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Once upon a time, Mary Anne didn't have a dog. She had a cat named Tigger.

And one day in eighth grade, he ran away.

This is the thing about animals: they exist on their own timetable. Especially cats—those suckers really don't give two craps about what you want. If they want to slip out of the house and meander around for a few days, well, you can just _deal_ with it.

When I was ten, Lewis's cat, Denny Crum, Jr., disappeared. The entire family fanned out over Belknap, screaming the cat's name—and confusing the hell out of the whole neighborhood since Denny Crum is a real person. And kids climbing into trees and shouting out the name of the head coach of the University of Louisville basketball team does come off a bit weird. Psychotic, even.

We went around the city for days, and no Denny Crum, Jr.

The damn cat waltzed back in after a week.

My mother, who had crawled on her hands and knees in the brush surrounding the quarry lake in the dead of night looking for Denny Crum, Jr., threw a clove of garlic at the wall when Evvie rushed over to tell us the good news. "See? Regardless of the Hunter situation, this is why we don't have pets," Mom exclaimed. "Disloyal little devils." She waved the knife she was using to chop herbs at me, adding, "See, Lo? Pets. Evil. Annoying. They're like kids, but even more selfish and unable to play Scrabble."

When Kerry got her turtle, Mom eyed it suspiciously and announced that it would stay in my sister's room, thank you.

Mary Anne's cat went missing, and she was distraught. Though she got that way about everything, I thought. I liked quiet people a lot—reminded me of my mom—but so sensitive that she'd cry if we passed by a sobbing child? Because she _felt bad_? That was a bit weird.

Balance, balance: it's all about balance. The weird crying thing and how meek she'd get sometimes against Mary Anne herself. Mary Anne wins. Way too easy.

Two weeks before Mary Anne's cat went missing, Dad signed me up for winter ball, a month or so of baseball, squeezing in as much game as the season would allow. Back home, that would mean almost until January, but here, probably only until mid-November, Thanksgiving at best. I got put on a seventh-eighth grade team at first, and it was so easy, I nearly slept through the practice games.

"You don't belong here," the coach of the team snorted after two weeks of me, bored, trashing all over the rest of the age group. "Why are you in this team?"

"My family is new here, and we didn't know this existed? So they kinda shoved me on this squad," I shrugged.

"Well, call this guy," the coach said, handing me a number. "This is the next level up, okay? You might be better than that, though. But you have to pass through the motions."

Cool. Not bad. And also: duh. I was probably better than most of the guys around, including high schoolers. This is what happens when your father works for a baseball bat company. You get lots of time in the cages, on the field. They call it "product development," when it's actually grown men screwing around and living out their dreams in their sons and the occasional daughter.

"They'll want to change you, though," the coach warned. I blinked at him, and he tapped my right arm. "A left handed hitter? That's great, but they'll want you to learn how to switch hit."

Oh, _hell_ no. Do you know how hard that is? How much time that takes? More than a winter league season, just tons and tons of time. No way. But I just nodded, walking away from him with that number in my hand. I promised myself: I would not tell Dad about this. He'd probably leave work early, come with me, and ruin everything.

Agree with that horseshit. And make this the worst four weeks of my life as I went from best to worst with the right-handed swing of the bat.

But if it's a Logan plan, it's a failing plan. I told my mother, who just _had_ to tell Dad that I was being moved up. "About time!" he declared. "I was going to call, but your mother said that winter ball wasn't worth making a fuss. I'll cut out of work, come along, huh? No more mistakes if I'm around."

Sure, Dad.

On Friday, my father and I drove over to the baseball diamonds at the city park, Dad wearing his Slugger shirt. When he looked over his left shoulder to merge lanes, I pantomimed blowing my head off. Please, I only wish.

"Dad, I just finished football," I sighed. "I don't _really_ want to do winter league, okay, if they're going to mess everything up with my—with everything. Can't I just wait until the spring to adjust my game?" Like normal people?

Oh, but no. We weren't normal people. Dad's mouth tightened. "You take every opportunity you have to maximize your potential, Logan," he snapped, poking his finger into my shoulder. "God didn't bless you with athletic talent to just fritter it away by _baby-sitting_ or reading a book, understand?"

"Yes, sir," I said, clear but quiet. I wish it could just be quiet of him.

"Besides," Dad laughed, pulling us into the parking lot. "What else could you play right now? Hockey? You've never done that before, why waste time learning it?"

"I could go out for basketball—show them Yankees how we do it," I shrugged. I had to be better than these idiots. Maybe I wasn't _bad_; maybe I just shouldn't be a forward. I had been thinking about that the other day as I watched a U of L game on TV, watching Taquan Dean leap up in the air. I wasn't really a forward at all. Maybe a guard would work better?

"Lewis does basketball," Dad spat, and his eyes zeroed in on me. "You're not going to waste your time on that when you already have baseball and football. Jesus, you sound like you don't even like this!"

I don't. Look at me: it's the first week of November, and it's freezing, and you want me to play ball. You found the league, you signed me up, and now you're going to go be Mr. Big Shot, Mr. I Work for the Company that Makes Your Bats, Mr. I Was All League at Conant, Mr. If I Only Hadn't Enlisted, I Coudda Made It.

It was amazing. My father found a way to make everything all about him. Last year, he had taken my baseball trophies and gone down to Mamaw and Papaw's place in Elizabethtown, lining them up against the awards he had won when he was my age. I had one less than him—he had won "Best Hustle." We didn't have that as an option on my team, but it didn't matter. His hand slapped my back as he laughed, and he pointed at the shelf jammed full of plastic trophies, laughing and laughing about how much more work I had to do.

They glinted like gold, but I knew they were fake.

Dad put his hand on my shoulder and walked with me up to the Coach. "Lyman Bruno," Dad announced, sticking out his hand. "I called you the other day?" He did? Crap.

"Right, right, from Kentucky," Coach smiled, squeezing Dad's hand as they pumped their arms up and down with way too much eagerness. "This must be Logan."

"Yes sir," I said—didn't sigh, good job, way to keep it inside. "It's nice to meet you. Coach Frank says you're the high school coach, too?"

He nodded. "It's a good way for our boys to keep active, off league. My son's a ninth grader, that's why I'm coaching this team? It's combined eighth-ninth grade, so you'll get to play with your future SHS teammates. That is, if you make the team."

"He'll make it," Dad said, his hand pressing hard on my shoulder. "He was all league and all age group, too. Second team all state, too—coudda been first team, but he had to sit two weeks due to an ankle injury, and that kinda cost him." And Dad had been furious, as if I had slid into third and jammed my ankle on purpose.

Do I actually have to be here?

Why doesn't Dad just put on my uniform and play himself? That's what he wants.

"Well, I'll expect great things from you," Coach said, nodding at me. Wonderful.

With a clap of his large hand on my back, Dad boomed, "Well, I'll hit the road. Have fun, Lo."

Sure. Whatever. Just go. Maybe, with you gone, I can remember why I loved this sport once.

I slipped away from Dad and Coach and jogged out to the field where the others were stretching. So Austin and Pete Black I knew. And I kind of knew Clarence King and Lew Greenberg. The rest were all strangers. Well, fine. Mom would say this would be an opportunity to make new friends, but she was the same person who curled up on the loveseat with a new book every night instead of heading off into the wilds of Connecticut to make new buddies. Hypocrite.

I glanced over my shoulder—what was Dad still doing here? Chatting up with Coach like the two of them were the best of friends? And now Dad was sitting down on the bench next to the assistants, all of them laughing. If he joined the coaching staff, I might have to stab myself. Last year had been horrible, Dad as the Little League coach. Where he'd send everyone home and make me do drills for an hour after. It's not that I minded the work—to be the best, you have to put in more than anyone else—it was the constant reminders of how he had been. Over and over, just how he used to be.

_I had a .527 batting average when I was your age. I was playing all of the infield positions when I was your age. I was switch-hitting when I was your age._

When I was your age, when I was your age: everything I did he had done, too. And somehow, he had done it better.

I sat down next to Pete. He grinned at me. "I was wondering if you'd get the balls to move up," he said.

"It's freakin' cold," I whined, huddling down over my legs.

Pete and Lew exchanged looks that screamed that I was crazy. "It's not that bad," Pete told me. "Just wear a pair of long underwear, it's nothing."

I blinked. "That stuff is real? I thought it was, like, what people wore in olden times, back before electric heat and stuff."

That look again. "Just wait until it starts snowing," Clarence—no, wait, _King_, yes, that's what he liked to be called, snickered. Snow_ing_? Like, more than once a year?

"So, what happened the other day on Halloween? I heard Kristy Thomas totally bragging that she schooled Cokie Mason at a graveyard?" Lew asked. "And you came up in the middle of it—what the hell?"

I rolled my eyes as I leaned over my left leg. "It was the most asinine—uh, ridiculous—" Watch the Scrabble words, Logan, don't nerd out. "—Thing that I have ever been a part of. I guess…Cokie and her friends were trying to humiliate Mary Anne? And so Kristy and their friends punked them back. On one hand? Awesome. On another? Cokie needs a hobby," I snorted.

"Dude, if Cokie Mason was up on my jock, I'd bite," King declared.

"She's an idiot," Pete spat. "I think she goes by Cokie because she can't spell _Marguerite_."

Shrugging, I moved over to my right leg. "She seems okay, but I lo—" Whoa. "_Like_ Mary Anne a whole lot. She's really freakin' cool."

"If you can get her to say five words," Pete laughed. "Not so much there."

"When you get to know her, she totally opens up," I protested. "She's really funny? And she's a great listener, and when she laughs?" I glanced up at the guys, staring at me like I was insane. Or whipped. Or both, maybe. "Um, it's…nice."

"Right," Lew said, too slow to be kind. Whatever. When they got girlfriends, they'd understand how it felt to have someone that you could totally trust. Love, maybe.

Definitely.

Coach came striding over, and I took a deep breath. Don't give them my resume, don't start it off like this. Like the football coach had, making everyone roll their eyes. Not here, too. And still? He did, ending with, "Let's see what the best of Kentucky can give us, huh?"

With my dad watching? Stay calm, stay calm. Just do what I can.

By the end of practice, I was covered in dirt and grime from pushing so hard that I ended up on my back over and over again. Dive for a catch. Slide for the extra base. Work harder than everyone else. I was covered in the proof of my hard work, but now all of the other guys were glaring at me. That's what happens when you go nuts in practice—you get people resenting you. King was notorious for making hard hits in football practice, but that was a bit different: you could make a good block and not rip someone's head off.

But me? I was making them look bad. How could I stop, though, with Dad right there? How could I not leap out, skid on my knees to get the ball and whip it over for a 6-4-3 double play? Didn't they understand?

No. Only Pete gave me a weak grin as practice ended, as my father stood with my coach, the two of them blabbering on about me.

"He's fast, but sloppy about base running," Coach noted.

"I think his catching technique is still completely vulnerable to collision," Dad sighed.

"Weak on the right—you see that a lot on left-handed kids," Coach said. Hello? Right here? "I think I want to force him into becoming a switch-hitter, that will help fix that."

"Yes!" Dad exclaimed. "That's it. You should start on that immediately—I was a switch-hitter myself by Logan's age, Two-Way Bruno, you know. I can't believe I never pushed it before—you shouldn't even bat him from the left, that way he can't slump back into his comfort zone."

I scuffed my feet against the dirt and tried not to scream. Or cry, I wanted to do that, too. It was never good enough, was it. No, it wasn't: Dad said, "He reminds me of me when I was a player, despite all of the flaws."

I closed my eyes and forced myself to breathe. This was going to be a horrible month.

Coach punched my arm. "Hey, you did great—real great. Actually, tomorrow afternoon? The open division practices. How 'bout you come? You can keep working on those fundamentals, start working on that right side."

"That sounds good," I nodded. I slapped my forehead and looked at Dad. "I have to sit for Hunter and Kerry." Mom and Dad were playing tennis with Dad's boss—_tennis_. How Yankee of them—if they came downstairs in white matching outfits, I might have to yarf.

"Call that little club of yours," Dad grinned. "Save time, one number, a billion girls, right?"

Right. We drove home with Dad listing off what the other guys did wrong—not really fun to hear, but better than listening to how much I suck or how much better Dad was than me. I glanced at my watch—a little after 5:30. I snuck up to my room and dialed Claudia's number. Maybe Mary Anne would pick up right away. Hell, maybe Kristy would let her _talk_ to me for a second.

Don't be an idiot, I scolded myself. And—oh, God, _don't_ request her. Kristy will have a shit fit. The phone rang once, and then Claudia chirped, "Hello, Baby-Sitters Club? This is Claudia."

"Hey, Claud," I answered. "I—okay, I'm totally calling on business, but can I talk to Mary Anne?"

I could hear her smirk, and then the phone got muffled, but Claudia must not have lowered the phone enough. "Oh, Mary A-_anne,_" she called in a singsong voice. "It's for you-_ou_." Oh, Jesus Christ, get over it already.

There was a faint scraping noise, and then Mary Anne's high, quiet voice, just like a little bell, said, "Hello?"

"Hi," I grinned.

I could almost feel her smile at me, and I pressed the phone closer to my face. "What's up?" she asked.

I bet Claudia had already tipped Kristy off that it was me. I could almost see her face purple with annoyance under that visor. "I need a sitter."

"For Kerry and Hunter?" she replied. No, pretty girl, my other five siblings. Don't tease her, don't take up precious phone time. Kristy was like the Incredible Hulk—you don't want to make her mad.

"Tomorrow at one, I know it's last minute. Mom and Dad have some tennis thing lined up with friend of theirs, and I'm going to baseball practice at school. I was supposed to sit, but the practice came up," I explained, wanting to tell her _everything_. The good, the bad, the Dad. Stay focused, though. "Can one of you do it?" Look at that, not even playing favorites and outright asking for her. Eat it, Thomas.

"I'll check our schedules and call you back in just a few minutes, okay?" she asked.

"Okay," I grinned. "I'll be waiting."

"Bye," she said, a bit too soft. Who would pick Cokie over her? The cold winter made people weird, I guessed. I grabbed a copy of _Sports Illustrated_ and was about two pages into an article on the Patriots when the phone rang again.

"Hey, Mary Anne," I said. "Who do we get?"

"Me," she beamed as Hunter ran into the room, sneezing his head off.

"Bob says didder's ready," he said between gasps and wheezes. Poor guy—I hadn't dusted in here at all this week.

I gave him a thumbs up as Mary Anne asked, "What's all that sneezing I hear?"

"Oh, it's my brother," I sighed, giving him a pout. "It's allergy season." Hunter nodded back, mouthing _Mold_.

"Poor Hunter!" Mary Anne clucked. "He—uh, I gotta go."

I laughed. "Say hi to Kristy and her mean, mean glares for me."

"Bye," she giggled.

I lifted myself off of the bed, glancing at the bruises on my arm. I tried to remind myself to call Mary Anne later, to tell her about what happened today. But I forgot, it slipped my mind.

And that was the night Tigger disappeared.

At the end of Saturday's second practice, an intersquad game, I was tripping over myself, half from the sight of Coach's constant head shaking, half from the sight of the assistant coach's fingers turning white from gripping the camera, half from hating myself for getting so mental that I was screwing up, and half because _I'm left handed_. Leave me alone! So what if Dad was switch-hitting, it's not going to happen with me! I can barely write my name with my right hand, and you want me to hit and catch with it?

That was four halves. I was twice the loser than I ever thought I could be.

"You can't baby your weak side," Coach snapped. "Honestly. Work at closing off that side of yours." Coach handed me the tape, shaking his head. "I want you to watch this—with your hitting, you'll see, it's an aiming problem and an issue with timing. Your timing is way off, Bruno." He chewed on his lip. "If you want to master this, you've got a lot of work cut out for you."

"Okay," I sighed. Terrific.

By the time I got home, I was grumpy, furious at myself and at Dad for ever suggesting that I could switch-hit. And Mary Anne was long gone—there goes getting a sympathy hug. I stuffed a baggie full of ice and walked upstairs, jamming the tape into my VCR as I settled the ice over my aching right knee. I took out a notebook and tried to write something with my right hand: _This sucks_.

It was totally illegible.

I switched then pen into my writing hand, my everything hand, and hit the play button on the tape recorder. Timing issues, huh? I rewound myself hitting over and over, watching for the secret. In my legs? No. Look at the way I'm standing, that seems off…?

"Hey, phone," Mom said, leaning in the room and tossing me the cordless. I caught it in my right hand—oh, _now_ I could do it—and exhaled, saying hello.

"Hey, it's me," Mary Anne said.

"Hey, me," I sighed. I narrowed my eyes at the screen and diagrammed out the way I was standing again. Shoulders…something in the shoulders… "What's going on?"

"Tigger's missing," she told me, her voice shaking.

"Gee, that's too bad," I mumbled, rewinding the tape again. Tigger's a _cat_. That's what cats do, I thought, rolling my eyes as I thought of stupid Denny Crum, Jr. Best not tell her that, though. She'd get all upset, crying that Tigger was different. More loyal or whatever.

"Logan, He's been missing for twenty-four hours," Mary Anne pressed.

She sounded odd—a bit angry. Over what? Her cat was off taking a stroll, I was getting blasted by Coach and Dad. Who had it worse here? "I'm really sorry," I sighed. Wait. I hit pause. Yeah, my shoulders were slumped too far forward, and I was swinging too quick on the slider. Because I was expecting it from the other angle. Duh. "Oh! Darn. Now, I see," I realized. Stupid, stupid…

"See what?" she asked.

"What went wrong in practice today. I'm watching tapes of our games," I explained, sketching out the correct posture. Okay, I could work on that. Sure, I could. It would just take hours and hours and hours and a miracle to get this to work.

How much did Mary Anne know about baseball? I frowned, thinking of how to tell her what was going on. But there was an odd silence on her end of the phone. "Well, I'll leave you be," Mary Anne said, too stiff and formal. "Bye, Logan."

"Uh, bye?" The hell was that?

Whatever. I sighed, rewinding the tape again and praying that the baseball fairy would come in the middle of the night, smacking me on the arm with talent that I didn't have.

Kerry was acting bizarre, hiding in her room all of the time. Hunter's allergies were at an all-time high, sending him practically into convulsions each time he sneezed. Coach was still riding my ass about my "weak side," and it was unnerving me so bad, I was just falling apart on the field, which then made Dad—who just happened to stop by yesterday—scream at me for an hour about my lack of dedication. At this point, they'd probably bench me. Or worse, send me back down to my original team, and everyone would know that Mr. Kentucky Baseball was a freakin' loser.

And now Mary Anne was pissed at me.

Given the complete and total smothering effect that baseball was having on my life, here is an illustration of how I was screwing up with my best friend, my girlfriend, the girl who, the day after Halloween, told me that she loved me.

Strike One: Whatever that was on the phone on Saturday.

Strike Two: When we were hanging posters of Tigger around town. Mary Anne seemed so upset, and I am not a heartless guy—admittedly, I thought that this was a bit of overreacting, all of the drama over a cat. Maybe a dog would justify this. Dogs were so loyal, dogs never up and ditch on you, if a dog was missing, then you spring into action. But cats? There wasn't a song called "The Cat Came Back" for no good reason.

The cat came back—the very next day. Thought he was a goner. Whatever. But my Mary Anne was upset, and missing pets aren't cool, so I turned to her as we hung posters on either side of a phone pole and said, "Mary Anne? I'm really sorry about Tigger."

She peeked around and stared up at me. "You are?"

What, did she think I didn't care? I thought Tigger needed more time to meander back, but I cared that she was so upset. What was wrong with us? Mary Anne and I talked about everything—though we hadn't talked much in the past few days. Not about what mattered. I sighed and looked her in the eyes for a moment. "Sure."

Mary Anne took a deep breath, and said, so slow, like she was looking far into herself, "I think that this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

She must be kidding me, right? I smiled at her. "Oh, come on. don't be so dramatic, Mary Anne. A lost kitten is sad, but aren't you overreacting a little?"

Considering that your mother died? You might not remember it, but on the "Worst Things that Could Happen Scale," from hangnail to _dead parent_, this has to be a five, right? And how lonely she was growing up? Hello, your friends and charges and everyone are rallying around you—look at this as a positive. Look how much you're loved.

Unlike me. I glanced around at the other girls in the BSC, and I felt so lonely, my throat scratched over in tears. Oh, for Christ's sake…

But Mary Anne was gaping at me, and then she walked away to get more thumbtacks from Kristy.

I chewed hard on my lip. What now? Here I was, making the effort to help her out, and I hadn't even mentioned breath one about my problems with the baseball team. I was giving up time that I could spend doing drills and working on my crappy technique, but I was _here. _I was miserable and tired and aching, but I hadn't saddled her with my problems because she didn't need them right now. I needed my best friend, but she had enough to deal with.

Besides, what was I going to do, show up at her house, sit on her front porch, and talk to her where the whole neighborhood could see me maybe cry over how much this sucked? Mr. Spier and his rules: I wasn't allowed inside of her house with him gone. Did I think I was going to rip off her clothes and have my way with his _thirteen-year-old daughter_? Because I'm _so_ that kind of guy. I wanted to kiss her so bad when I met up with her for the posters, but I knew she hated that in public.

And I hated talking about what I was feeling inside in public. Crying, looking weak—only when she and I were alone. That's when it was okay.

I stalked back home and stormed upstairs, past Kerry's still-closed door and slammed my own door shut. I flopped on the bed, tossing my baseball cap across the room.

Everything was going wrong. Everything, everything. And I hadn't felt so alone since my first day at SMS, standing in a hallway full of people who ignored me. Who didn't know my name and probably didn't care.

Strike Three, well, that _shouldn't_ have been a big deal at all. Some idiot kid sent Mary Anne a ransom note for Tigger.

That little shit. _He_ was to blame for all of this, wasn't he? If he hadn't taken Tigger, Mary Anne wouldn't be so upset. If Mary Anne wasn't so upset, then I could talk to her about my own problems. If I could talk to Mary Anne about what was going on, maybe I wouldn't be so locked-up inside, screwing up left and right in every. Single. Practice. And if I wasn't screwing up, then Dad would stop reminding me how much I had disintegrated since coming here.

"Best of Kentucky—what must they think of us." Dad groaned, watching a tape of me from Tuesday's scrimmage. I don't know, Dad. Maybe that you need to get a life that isn't mine.

I was going to kill that kid.

Mary Anne had called to tell me about the note, asking if she should tell her dad.

"No!" I yelped. "We're not involving any adults. No parents. No police."

"Why not?" she asked

"Because they'll just get in the way," I said. Parents always messed things up, didn't they, I thought, my eyes edging over my mitt.

Besides. I was going to kill that kid, and Mr. Spier might not be down with a homicide. Unless it was me, trying to sit inside of his house on a cold October day so I could do my homework with my girlfriend. God for-flippin'-bid I do that. The kid was going down, and I was going to throttle him.

And I might have, too, but he ended up not being the kidnapper, _catnapper_, at all. Just somebody looking for a quick buck. Lewis would have laughed, called it an ingenious scheme.

But he didn't have Mary Anne crying into his jacket. Fabulous.

I thought Mary Anne would chalk this up to me trying to help. Me, the hero. Me, trying to get things back to the way they were, so I could have _her_ back. Oh, but no. No.

At first, she was actually touched, how angry I was—I guess she chalked it up to my great love for her cat, but really it was for her. For us—hell, no, it was for _me._ It was like I was about to go into the biggest game of my life. I could feel my face wrenching into something nasty and cruel, and everything in my body that was soft turned to steel. I didn't know I had it in me, to bear down this hard. I felt powered like I had never been before, this energy of anger. It boiled down to this: you're fucking with me? I'll break your ass.

A little part of my brain filed that away: if I want something bad enough, I can be this strong. This scary. It was kind of cool—this was my game face.

That should have shown her, right, how much I loved her, too. Loved being with her, hated people who screwed around with her. I mean, after _Cokie_, hadn't she had enough of people messing with her? This was Mary Anne Spier, she couldn't hurt a fly.

She'd burst into tears the moment she touched the swatter.

This should have been the one thing for her to look back at and say, My boyfriend's so on my side. Instead, she thought it was part of a great conspiracy theory. A little subterfuge.

Because my goddamned sister had stolen Tigger.

_Katharine_, honestly.

Wednesday had started out pretty normal. I woke up extra-early to go to the batting cages and hit off of the T with my right hand. As if I was three years old again, biting my lip as I aimed. I then did some fielding drills—Coach had a point, I was weak on my right side, but I was making it worse with my own stupid worrying, wasn't I. If I didn't get it together, he'd bench my butt for sure. But I made a choice not to obsess. It was a good day: we had to go to the dentist. No, Kerry and Hunter were supposed to go, but Hunter's allergies were so terrible since Saturday that Mom had decided that he and I should switch.

Well, that's good. I might be sucking as a ballplayer, but my teeth were fantastic. I could get a bit of validation there. And some new floss—I was almost out again.

When Mary Anne came over, I was able to give her a quick hug before Mom and the birds invaded, Kerry scowling and jittery—what, had she been cutting out of brushing after breakfast? She didn't appreciate dental hygiene like I did—no one else did, thought Mom and her constant naggings to care for our teeth were neurotic. Dad thought the need for flossing was one of those myths, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

Or the Tooth Fairy. Mom kept threatening him that if he didn't take better care of his mouth, all of his molars would fall out, and all Dad would have would be an empty mess of sockets and a few shiny dimes for his trouble.

Kerry bounced from one foot to the other in the foyer, sweat beading on her forehead. What, did she think she had a cavity? Oh, _that_ would be funny, watching Mom hit the roof. Mom hadn't had a good freak out in a while, ever since the move. She was the opposite of Dad—she wouldn't yell, she would bug out her eyes and start muttering in Italian, slamming things in the kitchen. Until something broke, like a glass she had slammed too hard into the sink, and then she would whirl around and glare at the offending party as if _we_ had broken the glass or the plate with our own hands.

It was worse than getting yelled at, her stare.

But it was kinda awesome to watch, when it wasn't you.

Mom was explaining to Mary Anne why Hunter wasn't going—the great fear of him sneezing and biting the hygienist. He had done that once to Mom when he lost a baby tooth, and she was peering back into his mouth.

"Yeah, but us lucky ones still get to go today," I said, taking Kerry's hand. "Ah, I just love the dentist."

Everyone laughed, even Kerry. I think Mary Anne thought I was being sarcastic. She hadn't yet picked up on my oral fixation, though she had noticed that I always kissed her with a clean mouth. And she seemed to like it. Mint: drives the girls crazy.

Okay, that was just stupid. Mary Anne makes me lame.

Kerry was so agitated on the drive over. "Come on, Kay, it's a brand new set of hygienists to harass," I grinned. "Good times!"

Mom laughed, poking me. "Seriously, sparrow, you need to get a new hobby."

"But it's so much fun," I whined. And it was, leaning back in the dental exam chair and answering the hygienist's innocent question of, _How are your teeth feeling?_ with, "Well, I bit into peach and hit the pit, and six has been aching a bit ever since, and it's been tight to floss between nineteen and eighteen lately," and watch her eyes bug out.

I was going to make a banging dentist, I knew it.

I was finished before Kerry, waltzing into the waiting room with a smirk on my face. Shaking my new brush at Mom, I declared, "Perfect, thank you."

"That's my boy," she beamed, bumping a fist against mine. "Your sister is acting real weird—think she has a cavity or something?"

"That's what I was thinking," I said, tapping my nose.

Mom closed her magazine and studied me for a moment. "This is probably the happiest I've seen you in days. And it's the usual post-dental glow, so…is something going on? With Mary Anne, with school—baseball?" she prompted.

Dad. It was Dad, harping on me. Mom, make him stop, I wanted to plead. But how big a baby would I be if I told her that? I sighed, clasping my hands. At least I could tell her how hard it was, learning this new skill. How it was really, actually tearing me apart to fail like this and have Dad smash it in my face, how easy it had been for him. I wished that I played something that he didn't, something that he knew but didn't at the same time. A sport where he couldn't slap my back and say, _When I played_…

But Kerry burst into the waiting room. "Can we go now?" she pleaded.

"Cavity?" I smirked.

"Of course not," she snapped. "I just want to go home."

Mom rolled her eyes and stood up, walking over to the receptionist. I poked Kerry. "What is your damage lately?" I hissed.

"Nothing," she insisted, twisting her fingers. "I just want to go home."

Where Mary Anne was, where Tigger was. Where Mary Anne bolting out of there with her cat in her arms right by me clearly said, _Assistant catnapper_.

Mom, Kerry, and I stood in Kerry's bedroom, and I felt my body rush up in red. "Katharine!" I screamed. "God, how _could_ you! Mary Anne will never forgive me!"

"You—get out," Mom ordered, pushing my shoulder. "You have no part in this, understand?"

Oh, _sure_. Just that the missing cat had led to my girlfriend and me having this bizarre strain on our relationship. And, _and_! If Kerry hadn't taken Tigger, then Tigger would have probably gone home of his own accord—just like I had thought all along. Damn it!

Mary Anne and I made up within a day or two. She and I sat on her porch, and I ate cookies that she made me, and we talked out the rough patch. I told her about the baseball problems, she confessed that I had hurt her about not getting as upset as her over Tigger—and I told her that if I _had_ know? I would have taken her side in a heartbeat. Kerry was my sister; she was my Mary Anne.

But still. Still, there was something wrong. Something I didn't say.

Later that night, Mary Anne called my house. "Hey," I said, shutting my bedroom door. "How are you doing?"

"Good," she said. She smiled. Her voice always got so golden when she smiled.

I grinned, too. "Oh, I was wondering—tomorrow night, did you want to—"

"Yes." She laughed. "Yes, I do. But, I—I was thinking about you a bit. And not like that," she stammered. "But, well, I feel like you didn't tell me everything. I mean, the stress with the baseball and stuff? Is that really it? I just had a weird shiver a bit ago that maybe there was something else."

Mom and Dad were sitting in Kerry's room—Dad had just gotten back from a business trip, and it was his turn to talk with her. But had he yelled? No. He had only cradled her when she cried about being lonely. She was the _pricipesa_. I was Lyman, Jr. That's how it was. I couldn't talk about him when he was only yards away.

"Can I meet you somewhere?" I asked. "Like maybe the park?"

"I'll see you in ten minutes," she replied.

When she arrived, I took her hand and glanced around. Nobody was in sight, so I kissed her. She blushed, leaning her head into my chest. "So, is Tigger in his crate?" I asked.

"Under lock and key," she giggled. "Honestly, I don't know where that little Houdini move came from. He's always been such a baby, you know?"

"Mary Anne? He's a _cat_," I said, too patiently. "Cats are fickle and odd."

She rolled her eyes at me. "You are such a dog person, I can tell."

"And you're a cat person?" I replied.

"I'm a whatever cuddles with me person," she stated. And she blushed again, glancing at her arms, tight around my waist. What shade of red was that on her cheeks? Nuclear red? She pulled back and took my hands. "Okay. We promised to talk things over with each other, right? So. Talk to me, Logan. What's going on?"

I tightened my fingers in hers and looked over at Miller Pond. There were geese milling in the water, honking in noisy blats at each other. They sounded like my father.

"Hey," she whispered, squeezing my hands. "I love you. You can tell me."

"I—" I closed my eyes and looked at her again. "I love you, too, Mary Anne." She smiled, and just kept smiling at me, her eyes crinkling up at the corners and sparkling that strange copper shade that broke right under my skin. When she told me that she loved me, I had just kissed her, called her _my pretty girl_, murmured it into her long hair. I didn't say it back—I wasn't sure.

But I loved her. And if you love someone, you have to trust them.

Which is why I had such a hard time thinking that Dad loved me—he couldn't trust me to be my own man.

"Things suck with my dad," I began. And Mary Anne tugged me down to the ground, and she sat there, listening, her hands in mine, as the sky darkened into a dusky midnight shade, and the ground iced over with the cold of the night.

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I turned my car off of I-64 in downtown Louisville so I could get onto Main Street and pass by the Slugger Museum, the huge four-story bat leaning against the building. I parked my car in the lot and stared at it, massive and mean, waiting for a giant to swoop it up and crash through all of the buildings in the city. When I was small, I loved getting my photo taken next to it; when had I stopped being so excited, stopped begging Mom and Dad to take me to the exhibits? When did I stop wanting baseball?

The first time Dad had said, _When I was…_ When I was nine and got the season MVP. That's when. And yet I kept playing for four more years, until I had an excuse. If Lewis hadn't asked me to go to the UK camp, if I hadn't been too hungover to say no, I would have gone back to Stoneybrook and played in the summer league; I had been made starting shortstop on the team, a fourteen and over team. Shortstop: plays well into a strong left-handed player.

How long would I have kept doing baseball? I know, I would have been good enough for a college team. I could have played for Florida State or Georgia, maybe. Had I worked as hard at baseball as I did basketball, I could have gone anywhere. Would I have wanted to? Knowing that Dad would have crept behind me in every step?

_I could have played in college, too, but when I left Conant to help Papaw on the farm, I gave up my shot_, he had said so many times. _And we had no money, so I had to go into the Army. But I could have played_. And then what? I would have won, maybe, and Dad would have said that he could have, too? That I was weak here and weak there and needed to work on so many things? When would it have stopped?

When would I have been strong enough to shake him off of me? Probably never.

I reached over into my book bag and pulled out Mary Anne's gift. The shiny gold paper tore under my fingers as I peeled it back to see a photo of her and me in a silver frame. It was our wedding portrait, her on my lap, my head on her shoulder, the white roses of her bouquet spread out on the skirt of her red dress. She was pregnant already, but you couldn't tell. She had cancer already, but you couldn't see. She just looked so happy and beautiful, her hand curled up against my face.

And I looked so happy, too, sitting on my campus with my wife.

I looked at the frame, shining the weak yellow light of the street lamps. She had it engraved with an e.e. cummings poem, the one she had written into my skin back during our junior year. _Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence. In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near_

I shifted the car into gear, taking Main to Baxter, sliding down onto Bardstown and into the village of Belknap. This was home once, the melt of houses that I used to ride my bike by, Lewis and Evvie and everyone racing from our houses into downtown, over to U of L, screaming with laughter as we charted out everything that belonged to us in the city. Our city. _Your slightest look will easily unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose._

Bardstown to Trevilian, curling up Lakeside Drive, hugging the rise of the quarry wall as I turned left onto Eastside to make my way to Uncle Leo and Aunt Cathy's, two doors down from where the Keaton house was for sale. _Or if your wish be to close me, I and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending. _I lingered in front of their house for a moment before backing up and heading down to Trevilian again, and a few blocks over to Ravinia Avenue, the small stub of a street where our old house was. Except for a new mailbox, and a Western Kentucky flag where Mom and Dad used to fly a U of L one, it looked exactly the same.

_Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing._

Another family lived here now—did they notice the place where Dad notched in our yearly heights? The cabinet that never shut because Mom slammed it too many times? The goldfish grave in the backyard under the birch tree, the rock where Kerry bashed her hand after our cousin Lisa tackled her too hard in a game of football? Where I had written in the back of my closet, on the floorboard, This is my house. LGB.

Were they happy here? Houses could be filled with new people and recreated into a home, over and over. Just like a person could be. _(I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens ;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.). Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. _Ipicked up the photo of my wife and me and hugged it to my refilled body, and I hoped that for them, they were as lucky as me. To be reborn, to be at home.


	25. Chapter 22: Mary Anne

Allison pressed a few buttons on the back of her camera. She rested the long lens on the stump of her right arm, letting the camera dangle down from the strap around her neck. She picked it up in her left hand and rested it on the plane of her right forearm to snap a photograph of Kathleen, Sean, Flynn, and me.

"Simply fabulous," she announced, staring at the viewscreen.

"I like the other camera," Kathleen announced, skipping next to Allison with the large camera bag knocking against her hip.

Sean groaned, hefting the large box back into his arms. "The other camera is the size of a small child."

"Well, do you want a photo of you and Flynn that's super incredible, or do you want amateurish snapshots?" Allison countered, focusing in on the shadows cast by one of the academic buildings on the SIU campus. The latticework of light and dark on the concrete looked like a strange, ethereal lace, she took two photos standing up, and then one squatting down.

Flynn poked her husband and snapped, "Super incredible. Shut up, you, just haul the freaking camera like you're told."

Allison laughed, reaching into the side of her bag and grabbing a small notebook. "Okay, yesterday, I got the picture of Bucky's Dome, and the photos at the wine festival were really nice. Today. I want to get one scenic shot of the Tea House, and then I'll do the one of you two there. Tonight, I'll shoot a roll of film on my SLR of you two, then one more of Kath, and then one of May." She wriggled her eyebrows at me. "I have an idea for you, if you'll go along with it."

I frowned, watching her study me with wicked eyes. "What is this idea of yours?"

"All will be revealed," she cackled, stuffing the notebook away. "Hey, you promised us boating at this afternoon, dude. Boat me, Sean!"

"Boat me," he snorted. "I forgot how you take nouns and torture them into verbs, Al."

"Yeah, yeah, verbing weirds the language, I know," Allison stuck her tongue out at him, slinging her stump behind my neck. "How you feeling, May? Need a rest?"

Kathleen spun around and took my hand. "Yeah, we don't want you overdoing it like yesterday." Yesterday, where I threw up and had a dizzy spell at the wine festival. What had Sean said as he and Allison carried me back to the car? _Limits, Mary Anne. Know your limits_. You have cancer.

Unlike the three of them, I thought, staring at my friends' faces. No: Allison and Kathleen still had cancer, it was just sleeping. Hopefully forever. I took a deep breath and smiled. "No, I'm okay—though I really need to sit down soon. Are we close to the garden?"

"Totally," Flynn said, pushing her sunglasses higher on her nose. "Hey, Kath, while Al is setting up the camera? How 'bout you, me, and Sean play a bit of Frisbee?"

Kathleen nodded, the rows of her braids dancing together. "I will totally whip him again. May, I kicked his butt yesterday in Frisbee golf, it was so pathetic."

"Oh, Kathleen, you better watch it—Logan said he's gonna own you at that when you come down to visit us," I warned, shaking my finger at her.

She curled her fingers towards her body. "Bring it on, says I." She pulled an elastic band off of her wrist, snagging the braids in a ponytail. "Actually, I really like _golf _golf. Daddy and me and Stuart and Tiger went golfing last summer? And Tiger said I was really good."

"Oh, well, when I was playing baseball with Derek Jeter, he said I totally could play shortstop for the Yankees," Allison replied with a cool wave of her hand. She snorted, rolling her eyes. "Kath, you _do_ realize that the life you live is completely ridiculous. Golf with Tiger, tossing around the football with John Elway—as if these are just folks, stopping by."

"Uncle John is Daddy's friend," Kathleen bristled. "They are just normal people. They use the bathroom just like the rest of us."

"Yeah, but when they finish peeing? They win championships," Sean laughed. "I think we all need to have our next reunion at Kath's house."

Allison's face shadowed. "I think next time, we don't let three years go by."

Sean shrugged, kicking a stone on the path away into the brambles. "Everybody's been so busy. And it's gonna get harder—you and May graduate in two years, and if all goes right, I'll be in med school—I won't have much free time at all. May might have a baby, you'll be a jet-setting fashion photographer—and Kath'll be Tiger Woods, yall."

"I didn't say I was going to do golf," Kathleen protested. "They're so many cool things. Like, May got me a ticket to see Jessica Ramsey dance—maybe I'll be the next black prima ballerina." Kathleen lifted her arms above her head in an oval, twirling in a delicate spiral. "I'd just have to, you know, learn to dance and stuff."

We approached a small teahouse nestled in a small copse of trees, leafy green bushes hugging the path. The small building was open to the light breeze, a small bell nestled in the triangle of its roof. I brushed my hand over the bamboo as we approached, inhaling the sweet scent of growing wood and jasmine.

"Isn't this lovely?" Flynn smiled, sitting down on a bench in the house. "When I really need some peace and quiet, I'll come here to Kumakura and try to meditate a bit by the koi pond."

"And I thought this thing called Illinois was just Chicago and corn. It's Chicago, corn, and a Japanese garden—and wineries," Allison giggled. "Booze and meditation. It's a perfect way to spend the day."

Flynn grinned, tugging a Frisbee out of her purse. "Just yell when you're ready for us to rock and roll."

"It'll take me some time to get set up, but then I'll get to you." Allison motioned for Sean to set the camera box down, and she took the bag from Kathleen. Working between her left hand and the knob of her right forearm, she unlocked the box and pulled out a tripod and then the boxy head of her large format camera, one of those old fashioned devices with the accordion nose and long black drape covering the back.

"I cannot believe you sometimes," I clucked, settling down on the bench as the noise of our other three friends faded into the background. "Why don't you just use your regular sized film camera?"

"This gives me just amazing clarity, the detail is outstanding. I mean, I almost feel ashamed that this is only a 4 x 5 camera—Sally Mann works with an 8 x 10, and she's my total freaking hero. I totally asked Mom and Dad for an 8 x 10 for graduation, though I think Santa might bring me one for Christmas," Allison grinned, attaching the lens on the front of the long accordion nose. "Hello, Schneider," she sang, giving the lens a small pat. "I usually only use this for studio work, but I took some really incredible photos of Lake Havasu over spring break on this puppy. And I wanted to take a really fancy ass one of Sean and Flynn. I'll take more arty stuff on my small SLR."

I leaned back against the wall and swallowed down a quick bolt of nausea. "I wish you could have taken my wedding photos. My friend Erin did a really nice job, but you're a pro."

Allison blushed a bit, pushing the drape on top of the box at the end of the camera and glancing into the back of its body. "Well, at the real wedding, I'm your girl. Baby's first photos, too, if you go through with this. And—how about this. You two come to my show in August, and I'll take some studio shots of you guys. I'll even make Ethan clean the workspace," she added, wriggling her eyebrows.

"I'll talk to him about it," I grinned. "At the very least, I'll be there. Sharing a studio—that's a pretty big step," I noted, watching her adjust the position of the camera.

"Yeah, well, we also share with six of his classmates. I'm the only one not at Parson's—they called me the Tisch Bitch until they got to know me. Like I was just a total trust fund baby or something," Allison sniffed, tugging at her shirtdress, an outfit that just screamed _money_. She walked over to me with a light meter in her hand, clicking it all over the inside of the house for a few minutes before walking back to the camera. "Anyway, once they saw my shit, saw how hard I work, they changed their tune. I'm actually kind of tight with Norah and Cass, the three of us go out and do, like, art on the go around the city. It's total fun." She narrowed her eyes at something in the back of her camera, her fingers twitching around. "Cass is showing at the Emerging Artists show, too—she's got this really wild impressionist autobiographical style in her painting. I think you'll like it."

"Cool," I shrugged. "I'm just glad that Ethan makes you happy."

"He does," Allison glowed. "I don't know if we're forever or anything, but for now, it's really great. And he's totally been my best assistant with all of my projects. When we went to take photos at Children's Hospital, he was great with the kids, he didn't get freaked over any of the cancer stuff. I mean, Kath and me are still holding our breath, just praying that we make it to five years. It's no guarantee, but it's closest thing you get to someone saying, It's all gone. And Ethan understands, and he's sticking. I guess he once had a girlfriend with really bad diabetes, he gets how you can have an illness but still be, like, _you_."

She put her hands on her hips and then tossed the black drape over her head. "Can you get out of the shot, dear?" she called, her voice muffled.

I hauled my tired body up, walking over to her and sitting back down again on the path. Allison was quiet for a few minutes, her left hand stretching out from under the cape-like fabric and pulling the accordion in. I watched the drape move up, and a large wrapper fell to the ground. She dropped out of the fabric and sat down next to me, setting the timer on her watch.

"It'll take five minutes, then I'm going to get in the shot and give a little illusion of a ghost, and then another few minutes," she said, staring at the face of the clock. "Where was I. Yeah, Ethan's good. I love this—did I tell you? In the fall, I have an externship with a really awesome fashion photographer named Wolf. That's his name—Wolf. Wild, huh? He did the fall Armani campaign, and a lot of top lines are pegging him to snap their shit. It's a really huge opportunity for me—oh, and some of the models whose headshots I did? Are getting work. For the first time in a long time, I'm looking only to the future. I'm thinking, after graduation, of going to either Paris or Milan—fashion capitals of Europe and all. My French is _tres bon_, but my Italian is non-existent. _Ravioli._ That's about it."

"Well, let your photos speak for you," I said with a curt nod.

Allison laughed, nudging me with her stump. "That's sweet, thanks. Oh, I brought my portfolio—do you want to see it?"

"You brought it with you?" I squeaked as she ran to the large camera box.

She shrugged. "I didn't know if we'd stop at their house before going to his folks' for dinner, and I thought that I'd show off there. But, we have some time to kill."

I clapped my hands, receiving the black book. "So, these are your best photos? Are my senior photos in here?"

"Yours? No. But one of Emily's and one of Logan's. But you're in here. The photo Dawn had me take—you in the coma," she murmured.

I wrapped my arms around my chest. "I don't want to see that, not right now, is that okay?"

"Of course," Allison nodded. "I know where it is, I'll flip right by it, don't worry."

I took in a breath, pushing that fear out. The sleep that holds you down, drags out the want to live and make it into a leaden, heavy, hard stone on your back. On your heart. "Let me see Emily's photo first."

Allison smiled, turning to the fourth page. Her fingers glossed over the picture of my Emily, standing against a black backdrop, her bare body wrapped in a bleached and faded rainbow flag. There, in the pale stripes of once vibrant colors, she stood with her eyes lined a heavy, smudged coal color, staring at the camera as if it would answer her questions. _Who am I. What do I want_. Her hands were clasped in the middle of her chest, holding the sagging flag in place around her.

"It's just the most incredible photo of her," I breathed. "Her mom just wept when she saw it—the Bernsteins hung it in their living room, despite, you know, the gay thing, because it's just…it's the most vulnerable I've ever seen Emmy. Well, while sober."

"Thanks," Allison replied. "I always get huge compliments for it. Has she dated a girl again?"

I shook my head. "Though she's made out with a few at bars and stuff. I think Emily's still looking for someone like Navit—not a sycophant like Howie or a total party boy like Tucker. She wants someone to challenge her and support her at the same time. I know she'd rather have a guy, but she says that she first found it in a girl, so who is she to close off fifty percent of the people out there? Emmy's really focused on school and advancing her career, and she says that she's not in the mood to date at the moment. She's, like, so my hero with how focused she is."

"I love that about you," Allison grinned. "How you find at least one thing in all of us that you just admire. It makes me feel really special when you say those things."

I felt my cheeks heat up as she turned a few more pages. "Here's your boy," she said, tapping on another photograph. This time the background was white, the blot of his green away jersey startling against the lack of color. Logan was crouched low, his weight shifted to the balls of his feet with his arms wrapped around his knees. Wedged between his thighs and his face was a basketball, his cheek on its orange surface as if it were a pillow. He looked so calm, so at peace with a small smile set on his lips, curled up like a baby in a womb.

Touching my heart as I gave a drippy smile up at the sky, I flipped back to the start of the portfolio, to a photo of Tim's tattoo arching above the snake of his catheter filling the black and white rectangle. _WWLFD? _The concave sink of his chest took the air right out of my lungs—I looked like that, too. I missed him, our Lord Flash. What _would_ he do? Next, a color shot of an Asian girl's back, the twist of her arms holding a box of Benadryl between her palms. Her hair was choppy, dancing against the nape of her neck, hiding the bend of her face. On the opposing page, a girl with no legs sitting in her wheelchair in a bubblegum pink fairy costume, laughing wildly as a shower of bright, sparkling dust rained down from the fling of her hands.

"This next one—I bribed Dr. Hijapi to tell me ahead of time if I made remission because I wanted to get my parents' faces the moment they learned. And this is of the second that they read the information. Mom thought I had set up the tripod to take a family portrait, like, later? But I got them," Allison said, leaning her head on my shoulder as I gazed down at her father, his eyes bright with tears, her mother's hand drifting up in shock as they stared forward to where Allison must have stood, firing the remote shutter release as they took in the news that their daughter was well.

"You just know the exact moment to take a photo," I marveled, turning page after page of faces, bodies, people opening up their softest places to the glass eye of Allison's camera.

"There was a French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who talked about 'the decisive moment'—the most perfect time for a photo, when it is at its most significant. Call me egotistical, but I think that people like us? Who have to deal with running out of time? Have a better sense of timing than anyone else. I like to find people when they are at their most honest, you know? Because there is nothing more truthful than knowing that you might have to die," Allison sighed.

Her eyes met mine, and she said, "May, I want to take a photo of your chest tonight. Please." She tightened her hand on mine and then crawled away towards the teahouse, bending up into the line of the camera and spinning around in a slow circle, her arms outstretched like propeller blades. She twirled as if stuck in honey for a few minutes before standing still, staring right at the camera for another three, four minutes, before sinking back down and crawling away.

She walked to the camera and snuck under the drape; I watched her arm pull up and she fussed for a moment before coming out with a large black box that would hold documents. She cradled it for a moment before placing it in the nestle of the camera box.

I still stared at her, my mouth hanging open as she yelled for Sean and Flynn. My eyes drew down to the photograph open in my lap. I was almost terrified that I'd see my own limp body there, the way she had taken it from my feet stretching up to the place where a tube was jammed down my throat to keep me alive.

But instead, it was a girl, maybe thirteen. The girl's face was half obscured by a bag of blood dripping down a long IV. She was staring not at the camera, but at the blood, her eyes weary, swollen and dark. But full of hope. Full of faith. She looked destroyed and battered, but she was gazing up with a calm look in those eyes that said every prayer in the world.

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My phone rang, and I put my hand on Sean's shoulder, lifting up from the couch and away from the furious game of Hearts we were all playing with his parents, our desert plates empty of the cheesecake, as his brother raced around in a Batman costume.

His match baby.

I slipped outside and flipped the cell open. "Hey, Dawnie, what's up?"

"Not much. I just finished talking to Jeff," she said.

"He okay?" I asked.

She sighed. "He called Logan last night to apologize, and everything seems cool between them at least—and he talked to Kerry, and she said that she overreacted, but…he's still really…I'm worried about him. He has something he's calling the Doomsday Clock, counting down when he had to go back to California at the end of the summer."

"He needs to talk to Sharon," I urged. "I think you guys are underestimating her. She might not yank him to Connecticut, you know."

"Yeah, but she _will_ tell Dad. And at worst, Dad leaves Carol, and that's just going to be horrible. At best, what, Carol just treats Jeff like shit for revealing her dirty secret?" Dawn took in a hissing breath through her nose. "Jeff just needs to keep his head down and avoid it all. I told him to stay with Ducky a lot—Ducky's so fucking high all the time, he won't give two rips if Jeff's hanging out."

"Dawnie, this is way too much for Jeff. He needs to talk to his parents," I repeated.

"Sometimes, we can't turn to our parents, Mary Anne," she said, her voice so soft that it slapped me across the face.

I leaned against the porch railing and took in a shaky breath. "Well…how are you?"

"A bit lonely—Stacey's practically living in the library. Her final exam project is due in two weeks, and she's flipping out. Still, Monday night we watched all of our favorite _Project Runway_ episodes, and we went out on a date last night, and we had a total blast—we saw a Durham Bulls game and went dancing. It was really nice," Dawn smiled.

"Have you seen Henry at all?" I asked, closing my eyes.

"Yeah. We have a date tonight—just a movie. I'm going to take that mockumentary that you have? On the Californian Civil War? Oh, my God, Stacey and I nearly wet our pants laughing," Dawn giggled. "I bet he'll just adore it."

"It's really good," I nodded. Henry. _More_ secrets.

I heard a scratching noise. "May? I want to ask you a favor. Henry and I are thinking…since Stacey's class ends in two weeks, maybe then she'll be okay with the idea of me and him. If I tell her—would you be there with me?"

"Oh, Dawn, I'm so glad to hear that you want to tell her," I murmured, rubbing my forehead.

"I do, I really do. Stacey's my best friend—she's my other half. I can't stand hiding something from her. But I can't tell—is it worse to keep a secret or worse to tell the truth? I deserve to be happy, I know I do. That therapist, Harriet, says so. It's all so messy. Why couldn't I have just fallen in love with one of Lee's stupid teammates, huh?" she snapped. "They're all so hot. They aren't chubby econ freak shows."

I let out a small laugh, but Dawn gasped. "Oh! Dude! Did I tell you what happened when I took Randa to the airport on Monday?"

"No, what?" I moaned.

She burst into hard snickered but managed, "We had to stop at a gas station—girlfriend nearly cried at how cheap cartons of cigarettes were, so she bought four! And she told me not to tell you, but come on. How ridiculous is that."

"Very," I grinned, rolling my eyes. "She definitely did not mention that when she called."

"Well, I don't want to keep you—your visit is going good? Sean and Flynn answer all of your questions?" Dawn prompted.

"Yeah, but…it's kinda scary," I admitted. "There's this tiny part of me that doesn't want the baby to match because it's could go so wrong."

"It's better than not doing it, sis." Dawn stated.

"I know. Besides. The baby not being a match means—well, you know. And it breaks my heart to think about that," I whimpered.

Dawn was quiet for a few moments. "I love you, okay?"

"I know, I love you, too. I'll see you tomorrow. But now? I need to whip some butt in cards," I declared, thumping my fist against the porch rail.

"Bye, sis," she called, and the phone went dead. I held it in my hand for a moment before walking back inside, where my friends were standing up and hugging Sean's parents goodbye.

"We heading out?" I asked, tipping my head in confusion.

"George is kinda pooped," Felicia, Sean's mother, explained. "And we thought that nine was pretty late for you, not to get all mommy on you, Mary Anne."

I shrugged, giving her a hug. "You're probably right. Thank you for dinner, it was lovely." I took George's hand. "And it was nice to see you again, Batman. Good luck in keeping Carbondale safe."

He nodded gravely, his dark hair slipping out from under the cowl. "The Joker," he said.

"Yes," I told him. "You gotta get him." I let my hand curl around his face. If I had a son…if Richard had…my match baby will… I bit hard on my lip and let my hand fall away.

Felicia let George out of her arms, and I watched him run from the room before I put my hand on her arm. "May I ask you something that may be hideously rude?"

She glanced at her husband Manny, and he tugged at his beard. "About a match baby, right?"

"Yes," I nodded, looking between them and Sean.

Allison glanced at Kathleen. "Why don't we go step outside," she offered, tugging Kathleen to the door. We waited for the heavy wood to make contact with the frame before Manny spoke.

"Mary Anne, we had wanted another child, but it didn't happen. Then the timing just didn't work, between her career and mine," Manny explained. "And then Sean got sick, so we didn't even think about another child, not when we had to concentrate on him. When he got sick for the second time, we discussed it, we seriously considered it, but then he made remission, so we put it off the table. But—actually, Flynn is the reason why Felicia got pregnant with George."

Sean put his arm around Flynn and rubbed her back. "Flynn got really sick—like, we thought she would die sick. We had moved here to Carbondale, and she was still in New Haven, and I thought I would lose her before I could get out East again. She okayed this crazy treatment that used arsenic to try to beat back the crap in her lungs, just to buy her enough time to live until I could get there." Her eyes were filling with tears as he whispered, "She was awake for ten minutes, and we said goodbye, then she slipped away from me. And she didn't wake up for a week."

I buried my face in my hands. Logan rushing to the hospital where I was bleeding. What if I had died that day? Without him saying goodbye, what if I had died? What if I died without my father forgiving me? He had held my mother in his arms when she passed away, and he was shoving me out of his grip. What if that happened to me—dying alone from my father? I felt my knees buckle as a wave of dizziness hit me, and a gather of hands helped me into a chair.

"Drink this," Manny was saying, handing me a glass of water. I sipped at it and stared up at Sean and Flynn, begging them to continue.

"I don't know, I came home from that, and I said to Mom and Dad that I could get sick again at any minute, that it might happen so fast that we might not have the time to react. That night, we had dinner and held hands and made sure that we said everything that we needed to say to each other—how much we mean, how much we love and stuff," Sean mumbled, pulling out a wadded tissue from his shorts pocket and handing it to his wife.

Felicia looked at me, touching my head. "Manny and I decided that we would try to conceive again, just in case Sean got ill. We could sit down and debate this all day, if it was right or not to have a baby to save Sean, but at the bottom of it, George was so wanted. He was loved, regardless of what his genes were. And before we did anything, we met with a genetic counselor who said that we had to be sure that we knew that, regardless of how perfect the HLA markers were, this transplant may fail, and that we'd be left with this baby."

"A baby that we loved," Manny repeated. "That part was easy—if Sean died, it wasn't George's fault. It was just Sean's time. We had trouble with the idea of using a helpless baby like that—was it fair since the baby couldn't consent? And we decided that it was. These were parts that would be discarded otherwise—and now, people save cord blood and placentas in case of familial transplant. It was just picking up steam in 2005. And Sean ended up getting sick in Felicia's sixth month. We were very lucky that it all worked it, so very lucky."

I let out a long breath and stared at the water in my hands. Water for the firegirl. "I—I wanted this baby even before they mentioned it being a match. But I might not be able to keep it."

"You're doing the baby no favors by being on the brink of exhaustion and breakdown, Mary Anne," Sean told me, still holding Flynn close to him. "If you're using the transplant as an excuse to keep the baby, hey, that's your own choice. But we said it all the time at Yale, right—you gotta live. You've just got to. Tattoo it on your forehead, chant it every hour if you have to. You might have to give up a lot to get there, but you still gotta live. Don't feel guilty about putting yourself first."

"I'm not," I sighed. "Not anymore. I'm more worried about Logan. If I get a transplant, and it fails, and I die, and he's left with the baby. I just wanted to know—I trust him to be strong, but I wanted to know what it would have been like for you two."

"When it comes down to it, Mary Anne, you love your kids," Felicia said, spreading her hands open. "You love them, and that rules the day. You hold them close, and you just have to adore them because they steal your heart right out from the moment you see them. If you pass away, he will love that baby, I promise you. It's what you do as a parent."

Unless you are my father. But I shoved that down under my heart, taking furious gulps of the water until that drowned.

We said our final farewells and shuffled out to Flynn's car, making our way back to the neighborhood where their small house was. Allison had prepped their living room as a studio, draping heavy white sheets over a wall and the floor and putting all of the floor lamps in a circle around the area. She glanced at me, and I shook my head. I wasn't sure yet.

"I think we should play Truth or Dare," Allison announced, putting the flash on her small film camera. "With booze."

"I can't drink," I said. "And Kath is fourteen, no way!"

"We can have soda," Kathleen declared, following Sean into the kitchen. "Daddy said he'd give me a hundred dollars every year until I'm twenty-one if I don't drink."

"I'd take the money and lie," Allison snorted.

Kathleen poked her head out of the kitchen. "Why would I lie to my dad?"

Allison looked at me, putting her hand over her heart and mouthing, _Aw!_ But my lower lip started to tremble. What would it be like to be that close to your father? I knew not wanting to disappoint him. And I had. By being depressed. Getting cancer. This baby that was still here. I was a failure. I was Alma. I clamped down on that shaking lip and forced him out of my head as Allison stared at me in sympathy. She knew, the line of her eyes said. She remembered him from back then—she knew.

"Okay, Truth or Dare, Kath," Flynn called, plopping down on the couch in a tube top with her jeans. She took a beer from Sean and wriggled her eyebrows at the girl.

"Um—truth," Kathleen said, sitting on a chair.

"Have you ever kissed a boy," Flynn asked, grinning at her.

Kathleen blushed. "No, not yet. Boys don't really like me. And I swear, it's not the cancer, it's because they're scared of Daddy and my brother. That they'll get beaten up. It's so retarded," she sniffed.

Sean snapped his fingers at her, taking off his shirt. "Uh uh, liar liar. Tim kissed you."

Kathleen's brown skin crisped over with a furious red as Allison gaped at her. "Kathleen Abamwe! You did not!"

"It doesn't count, you meant, like, a boy asking me out," Kathleen protested. "Timmy said that I deserved to be kissed, just in case. And he was..." She put her hands on her cheeks.

"Your first crush," Allison supplied. "It's okay, you can say it. Somewhere up in heaven, he's probably woofing in delight at being some girl's object of desire."

"Yeah," Kathleen murmured, her hands drooping down. "But then I met Davis. One day, I'll be eighteen, and he'll be twenty-five, and we'll totally date. He's fantastic, we watch all of his games on TV? And he emails me a lot," she gushed, clasping her hands together. She gave Allison a mischievous glance. "Truth or Dare, Al?"

Allison pointed at the floor. "Sean, lay down, Flynn put your head on his chest. Um…truth."

"Did you love Timmy?" Kathleen blurted out, shifting higher in her chair.

Allison winced. "Well…okay. We slept together, but I think everybody knew that. To be real, Tim was kinda annoying, all his weird British stuff. And he kinda looked like a Fraggle, all goofy and gangly," she giggled, moving Sean's right hand to rest behind his head, bending his left arm over Flynn's chest. Allison made that hand meet Flynn's right hand, his fingers whispering on her cheek, with her left hand looping over to touch his left shoulder. "But I wanted what he gave me when we were together—the validation of my body. I got that confused with him validating _me_. I was so hurt after Kieran dumped me because of the cancer, it was just a mistake." She glanced at me. "It wasn't like you and your guy. When you two would mess around, it was about you and him. When Timmy and I did—it was about him wanting ass. It took me a while to sort that out."

She took a step to stand over them, straddling Flynn, and began taking pictures. Five, six. "Now look at each other," she commanded, crouching lower. Ten, eleven. "Okay, move your hands up, Flynn close your eyes, Sean look at me." Sixteen, seventeen. "Flynn, move your hand—yeah, and Sean look at that? Flynn look at me." And she clicked out another bunch. "Okay, Flynn roll over, and—yes! Don't move!" Allison pressed the shutter release over and over until the camera whirred the film back into place. "All done. Sean, Truth or Dare?"

"Dare!" he barked, sitting up.

"I dare you to run around the outside of the house and sing a song from the _H.M.S. Pinafore._ Without your shirt," she ordered, changing the film in her camera.

Sean leapt up to his feet and saluted as the rest of us cackled with laughter. He threw the door open and boomed, "And it's surely to his credit," he began, lifting his arms above his head, the tattoo of his brother's initials stretching on his arm. He raced to the left, and we could hear the low, off-key operatic run of the song, his white body flashing like a ghost against the windows as he circled around. When he appeared back in the door, he took a huge breath and belted, "_Maaaan_!" with his arms open so wide.

Kathleen and I jumped to our feet. "Bravo!" we cried, as he bowed.

"Thank you, thank you, and fuck you," he said, pointing at Allison. "And somewhere, Aaron Sorkin is crying with pride, huh? Okay, Flynn-a-lynn, Truth or Dare."

"I would take Dare, but I don't want to make a prank phone call or whatever," she said, shaking her beer at him. She screwed up her face in thought as Allison had Kathleen sit in front of the white wall. "Truth, then."

Sean smirked. "Okay, baby. Have you ever cheated on me?"

Flynn stamped her foot on the ground in anger as Kathleen laughed, Allison quickly snapping photos of the girl's joyous face. "Let it go, you dork! It was high school, and you know for a damn fact that Bobby Martin was hotter than a hamburger, so deal! Besides, you were trying to mack on Julia Lorde, you're just jealous that I got a piece, and you struck the hell out in your quest to get some from a girl not named Flynn."

Allison glanced back at me with her face twisted in laughter, and I gripped at my chest, trying to find my breath under the hysterical giggles. My chest.

I looked at Allison's camera as she titled Kathleen's head down onto her knees. Flynn was saying my name, and I shook myself to attention. "May? Truth or Dare?"

"Truth," I heard myself reply.

Flynn sighed. "Do you really want to be pregnant at nineteen?"

"No," I whispered, and I watched Kathleen's face fall, the quick click of Allison's camera. The decisive moment of our sweet Kathleen open in sorrow. The way she was during treatment. The honesty of her. "I don't. But…this happened for a reason, my body got healthy enough to start working down there, and the moment it did? I got pregnant. This has to be more than an accident, I really believe that." I wiped my eyes and tried to swallow back the rest of my tears. "But…I love this baby, but I have to live. And I'll do anything to live. It does no one any good, not me or it, if I have a heart attack and die trying to get this baby to term if it's not a match. It's risk-reward. The reward of just being a mother isn't worth risking my life."

At least, I don't think so. Not now.

Logan picked me, and I was glad. I wanted to live.

I looked at Allison and murmured, "You can take my photo."

Kathleen stood up and wrapped her arms around me. "We'll leave the room if you want."

"It's okay. It's nothing that some you haven't seen before," I whispered, waving at my eyes. The myth of Closed Door back at Yale—how many times had they walked in while I laid flat on my back, my naked chest exposed to the air to help the surgical wounds heal? We were all survivors here. There was nothing but truth.

Allison sat down next to me and pulled a small make-up case out of her purse. In silence, she drew liner around my eyes and coated my lashes in a thick, oily mascara. She kissed my cheek and walked over to a few of the lamps, turning them off so that the sheet was a weave of shadows. She had me stand in the middle of the shadows and light, turning on and turning off lamps until she got the right pattern.

Flynn, Sean, and Kathleen sat on the couch, their eyes open and encouraging, not wet with sympathy, but understanding. Knowing. We had all been here before. This is us, our history, the truth of our skin. Allison unsnapped the flash from her camera and changed the film, placing two more canisters in front of her feet.

"Whenever you're ready," she said, reaching forward to squeeze my hand.

I nodded, reaching up to slide my shirt over my head, careful not to touch the makeup on my eyes. Allison nudged me into place and then took a breath. "Alright. Cross your arms over your chest, okay, and look at me."

I will not cry. I will not cry. I will only look forward at her, and I will not cry. I stared into the glass, into the reflection of me staring back, a pale sylph of a girl with night-dark hair, the shine of sad eyes. I struggled against my tears, that feeling tickling behind my lips. This was me. Nothing hidden, just me. I linked my fingers behind my neck and let my head dip down. I felt my elbows spread, the scars on my chest peeking out, my catheter flopping down.

Allison kept taking pictures, saying nothing, just watching me stand there in this struggle. She changed film and balanced the camera back on her stump. She had gotten back to normal, better than ever. A better girl than she was before she was sick. Not the Allison Ritz who had hurt Stacey so badly. An Allison in search of truth.

"Can you put your arms down?" she whispered. And a ragged gasp came out of my mouth, and I pressed the backs of my hands against my eyes. Click, click, click, like the counting of a clock. I felt myself giving in to the crying, tracing my fingers up onto my forehead and staring at her as she kept taking picture after picture. Documenting this. The way I was breaking.

But I was still standing. I wasn't hiding. I was here.

The rapid teeth of the shudder chewed photo after photo of me. Me, staring at Allison. Me, staring at the ravage of my chest, the catheter that looked lonely without the chemo pump. The mascara was racing down my face on the river of my crying, but when I went to wipe it away, Allison told me no.

She switched film again, and I stared down past my chest, putting my arms above my belly, framing the cancer from the baby. As if I could will the two apart, these two objects beating on my energy. One, wanted. One, not. One that could fix the other—but could kill me, too. I was a time bomb, I closed my eyes and let the breath slip in and out of my mouth as I touched my stomach.

Who will win here?

"You look beautiful, Mary Anne," Kathleen whispered. I stared at her for a minute and then laughed.

"Oh, Kath, you're a wonderful liar," I said, coughing over and over with little laughs.

"Dead sexy," Sean agreed. "Courage is sexy."

I covered my smile, still laughing, and Flynn started clawing the air, purring like a hungry tiger. "Stop it!" I giggled, bending my head.

Allison lowered the camera on her arm. "Wipe your eyes, Mary Anne."

So I did, still laughing, and I stared back at her for a moment, then raising my hands up to my hair and drying my fingers by running them through the mass of curls, so thankful when I looked down at my hands and saw no hair there. Maybe soon it would all come down, thick like snow, but not yet.

I looked back up, staring into the camera, and I waited for Allison to finish capturing me in the honest eye of her machine. And I wondered: who is the Mary Anne I will find staring back?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Yes, Daddy, I'll call you before we leave O'Hare," Kathleen was saying into the phone as our cab pulled up to the airport. "Uh huh—oh, that sounds great! Yeah! Okay, I'll see you in Hartford. Love you, too—bye!" She snapped her cell shut and beamed at me. "We're having dinner at my favorite place. Yum, steak."

"Red meat rocks," Allison agreed. "I wish we had gotten carryout from that place in Murphysboro. God, that was possibly the best ribs in my life."

I grinned. "I do agree, though only on the possibly. Logan and his family make the best barbeque ever. But they say their sauce is Kansas City meets Virginia and has a lovechild with good ol' fashioned Italian roasting. Whatever. It's incredible."

"I want to come down and see a game," Kathleen said. She grabbed Allison's arm. "You can come, too! And take some photos! It'll be so much fun."

"Anytime you want," I told her, scooting out of the cab. "Just say the word."

"I'm ready to go home," Allison sighed, scratching the missing wrist on her right arm. The phantom pain. I adjusted the chemo pump that hung on my chest and tried to ignore the ache there. "Sleep in a bed, take a long ass bath. And I can't wait to see Ethan."

I touched the photo of the two of them, nestled in my purse next to my ticket. "I'm ready to go home, I guess, but Logan's not back until tomorrow? And Dawn's out of town visiting a friend of hers from school who lives in Charlotte—and with Stacey at the library all of the time, I like being alone, really, but I don't want to be right now."

Allison chewed on her lip as the cabbie pulled our bags out of the trunk. "Do you want to go back to Durham? Or do you want to go _home_."

"Durham is my home," I told her. "Well, no. My home is with him, you know? It's cheesy, but home really is where the heart is, I guess." I sighed, watching Allison tip the driver. "But yeah—I guess a part of me wants to go see Dad."

"What's stopping you? Scared that he'll be an ass?" she asked, pulling her bag behind her.

I shrugged. "Maybe, but I want to see him more. Truth? It's money. Changing the ticket has a penalty fee, and then I'd need to get another ticket to go back to Carolina from there. I don't want to blow several hundred bucks on a ticket when I could use it on, like, me and Logan. I don't want to waste money on Dad when he won't take the time to reach out to me."

"Well, if it's money," Allison said, halting on the other side of the door. "Hi, I'm the First Bank of Allison, with an American Express black card, baby."

"Allison, _no_," I declared, stamping my foot. "I will not let you."

She tipped her head back and laughed. "Uh, hi? Once? Laine Cummings and I got a hotel room at the Plaza and changed four hundred bucks to room service. And my parents were like, Eh. Come on. If it wasn't for the cancer, I would probably be as insufferable of a trust funder as Laine, but, you know, getting an arm chopped off kinda reels you back in from the bitch ledge. I love buying people things. Right, Kath?"

Kathleen nodded. "When I went to visit Allison in the city, she bought me a ton of stuff. It was so fun."

"You want to talk to your dad. You _need_ to. If you feel so guilty, write my dad a thank you note. His secretary will send you something nice back," Allison shrugged. "Come on, May, it's time to go home."

I bit my lips and followed her to the ticket counter. We watched Kathleen check in for her flight to Hartford, then Allison and I walked up together. She checked in without incident, and then she rested her stump on the counter.

"Yeah, we need to do a little bit of switching with her ticket," Allison said, gesturing at me. "Change it from here to RDU to here to Stamford, Connecticut, and then from there to RDU on Friday."

The ticket agent blinked at me. "Is that right?"

"Yes," I answered, clutching at the pump under my dress. "I need to see my dad."


	26. Chapter 23

Dad ran his hand over his forehead, the long stretch of balding skin dewy with sweat. "I didn't expect it to be so hot in October," he sighed, tugging on his sweater to let some air in against his body. "Honestly, Annie, how do you manage?"

I shrugged. "It's air conditioned indoors. Really, Dad, you get used to it. Erin's from deeper South, down in Charleston, and she says this is nothing."

Dad's head bobbed, and we followed the tour guide as she wound us back to the beginning of the walk in the center of East Campus. The other parents were chatting with their children, but my father and I walked in silence as he stared at the buildings. I had been at school here at Duke for ten weeks, but this was the first time he had come. Sharon moved me in back in August because he had a trial in the State Supreme Court the next week—for once, a court date that I could be certain wasn't an excuse.

And he had promised, shutting the passenger's door of the Buick as Sharon started the car the day we left, that he would come for Parents' Weekend. Now he was here, panting slightly as we made our way around the hilly campus, just drinking in all of the rock-sided buildings, the trees that stretched long up to the sky, hiding the school in their limbs.

We walked towards my dorm, where Dad sat with a loud sigh on a large wooden bench. Fanning his face with the visitor's folder, he touched the painted seat. "So, you burn these after games?"

"I guess," I murmured, touching the wood near his hand. "I—I'm kinda scared to be around it."

His mouth curled slightly, and his fingers rested on mine. "If you get scared, just do what Dr. Paves has told you about handling a fire. There's no shame in taking a few moments to center yourself."

I nodded, letting my eyes close for a moment. December of my freshman year of high school, a house in Kristy's neighborhood had burned to the ground—I heard the scream of the fire engines in our rental house on Bradford Court, the place we were still marking time until the new house was built—the idea of revamping the barn had fallen apart when the contractor said that the old barn was too much of a fire hazard. The idea of living in a tinderbox reduced me to a sobbing heap, and Dad and Sharon changed course the next day. A new house for our new life.

The sirens tore me out of sleep, and I ran to the window, glancing around the neighborhood, all of the houses cloaked in a peaceful darkness, the white blanket of snow still on every intact roof. But, towards the north, up by the ocean, the sky was flickering orange and red. And in my body, I could feel the promise of choking smoke.

I ran screaming into Dad and Sharon's room, barreling between their sleeping bodies, begging them to keep me safe. We went down into the living room; Dad made me a cup of tea, and Sharon set the fire extinguisher in front of my feet, and we spent the rest of the night there, all of the lights blazing in the room, and flipped through channels on the television until the first hints of dawn.

That's when Sharon said it was time to call Dr. Paves.

"What if I see a fire?" I whimpered to her later that day as I curled in a ball in the armchair in her office. "What if I panic like that, in front of people? Or if I'm alone?"

"You're never alone, Mary Anne," she said. "You always have yourself, don't you?" I swallowed, letting my head knock against my sternum, as she watched me for a moment. "How do we push past the fear and get to Mary Anne?"

That was the most important thing—find myself in the center of all of that panic. By breathing, by talking to myself until I heard that it was okay to be afraid, but that I had to know that I had be strong, too. Save myself. Don't give in. Be a smart, smart girl and do right by me.

The next two weeks, I had the fire dreams again, my mother killing me with a smile on her face as she locked me in my burning room. But I wasn't alone—my friends slept over, my more-than-a-friend Pete took me to see a Regina Spektor concert in the city, and my father and stepmother sat in my room every night until I fell asleep.

My father had watched over me then. When I was a mess inside of my mind—but not dying. I was clinging hard to the idea of Mary Anne, but I was alive, so alive. But when I was so sure of the girl I was, so solid in _me_, but whispering against death, then my dad disappeared. Why?

At some point during my senior year, despite the eating disorder, despite the catheter that stayed in my body until late September, he started seeing me without seeing her—my mother. Sometimes, I wondered if it was seeing me with my boyfriend, how easy it was for Logan to be close to me, to love me and want me and need me, if that pushed my father back to me. A sense of competition, maybe. My father was a litigator, he loved a good fight when he could control it. He had lost the battle of understanding me best, but still—all was not lost. Maybe.

He started calling me Annie more often. He told me he loved me. He looked me in the eye without fear again. I turned my head to stare at him, sitting next to me on this bench, as healed as I could be, and his eyes were reaching into me. What was he trying to touch? The promise that we could always stay like this?

You don't get promises, you don't get guarantees. You only have this minute.

Dad sighed, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his shirt. I noticed his eyes were bright with tears. I let my fingers run over his hand. "Dad?"

"I was just thinking--" _About your mother. How proud she would be right now._ But he had said that already, his face ribboning with the press of tears, when I drove him from the airport to the steps of my dorm. "I was just thinking how I wish my parents were alive to see this."

My mouth opened, but I couldn't make anything come out for a moment. "Your—parents?" I managed.

He nodded, giving his lenses a final swipe before settling his glasses back on his face. "My father was a mailman, my mother cleaned houses. And they were so proud of me for getting that scholarship to Maryland, and then my father got to see me get into law school. But this," he sighed, looking around the oval of grass before us. "But this…their granddaughter is at _this_ school. It would have made them so proud, Mary Anne. This was their dream for the Spiers. My brother was supposed to be great, and then he was killed in service. So it fell on me. I've done my best, but my daughter, she is the one that would truly make my parents proud."

I squeezed my lips together, gating my lips against my tears. "Thank you, Daddy. I've always wanted to make you proud of me."

Dad's hand held mine for a long moment before unwinding away. He rimmed his eyes with his fingers and took in a deep breath. "So—is it time to head to dinner?"

With a glance down at my watch, I nodded. "Yeah, we need to go pick up Logan first. You're really going to love the restaurant, Dad. When Erin's parents came last month, they took us to Nana's, and they have these Brussels sprouts? You'll just faint, they're so good."

"Brussels sprouts," he snorted. "Do I look like Sharon?" But he smiled, his hand fluttering behind my back as we headed back to the car. Halfway on our drive to Chapel Hill, he pulled out a file from his briefcase, clicking a pen to life as he began making notes on a brief. I tried not to sigh; he was here, he was right next to me. How much more could I ask of him? He was still my father, after all, always pushing himself. I felt the hands of his parents on my body, that same push that had been propelling him for decades. To be better than where you came from.

I pressed the hazard lights when I parked in front of a dumpster next to Logan's dorm. "Do you want to come in?" I asked. "See how the slummy school lives?"

Dad raised his eyebrows. "I've already seen the best. I'll stick with this, thank you." I giggled, climbing out of the car and dashing over to the side door, slipping into the dorm as a group of girls left the building. His door was right on the corner, four windows in his room instead of the usual two. Special treatment, I rolled my eyes. I had a first floor room, too, requested due to my fear of fire. I wondered if the residence life staff had laughed at me when they got my note on the dorm request form—but I didn't care. I could sleep the whole night, knowing that safety was just a jump away.

The door was cracked open, so I pushed my way inside, trying not to grin at how little my boyfriend was represented in the room he shared with this star center from Memphis. Logan had called me on his first day, complaining that the kid had covered the walls in rap posters, that 50 Cent's eyes were following him, _and I think 50 Cent doesn't like me, _tesorina. _I think he knows all of my dirty secrets. Seriously, the room looks like The Shawn Show, with a cameo appearance by me—meaning, I get to have my desk and my bed. It's ridiculous!_

I told him to take down the posters on his side of the room, but Logan had said no way. That I would understand when I met the guy why Logan wouldn't make him angry. The day after my eighteenth birthday, we came back to the room, and I had to tip my head all the way back to stare up at Keshawn, a solid boulder of a boy who made Davis look small. He redefined huge.

"Keep the posters up," I whispered to Logan as we left the room.

"Hell, yeah—I'd like to live to see second semester," he agreed, glancing back over his shoulder. "That is, if 50 Cent doesn't kill me first. Wasn't I right, doesn't that poster look like it hates me?"

Yes, it did, glaring down at my boyfriend's desk as he hunched over his calculus textbook. I wrapped my arms around his neck, kissing his cheek as he scratched out a formula. He turned his face and smudged a kiss back on my lips. "Give me two minutes," he mumbled, tapping his pencil on the paper.

I rubbed his head and flopped down on his bed. Sneaking a hand under his bed, I pulled out the plastic container where he kept his stash of Oreos—shades of Claudia Kishi, I thought, taking a cookie out. With a twist, I separated the sides and licked the frosting out of the middle. It was nice to eat without fear again, to eat what I wanted, when I wanted, without my body rebelling against it. Nibbling the cookie, I glanced at the small table next to his bed, the photo of him and Hunter and Kerry at one of Hunter's lacrosse games. The photo of Logan and me that Emily had snapped this year at Prom, the two of us laughing as he spun me around to song I had slipped to the DJ—our song. Or at least one of them. Every month, I had a new one. But that song: it was special.

After another minute, I sighed. "Angel," I warned, but he held up a finger, his eyes boring through his glasses down at the page. "My dad is waiting."

That finger flew up again, and he knocked his knuckles against his head. I groaned, sinking back down on the bed. A moment later, though, he tossed his pencil down. "Done," he beamed, jumping up out of his chair and walking over to me. He stretched his body over mine, and I sighed against his mouth, locking my arms behind his shoulders. We had been back together for a month, and I still felt like we were making up for lost time. I wondered—no, not right now, no matter how much I wanted it, _him_. If only my dad wasn't waiting outside.

"Guess what my dad said to me," I prodded, touching his nose.

"Sharon has finally won, and he's giving up meat," Logan replied.

I laughed, "Not so much." I told him about what Dad said about Mom, what he said about his own parents.

His face bloomed up in a smile. "That's incredible, Mary Anne. I'm so glad that you two are, like, connecting again."

"It's not perfect, but it never really was," I said. He pushed a lock of hair away from my lips; it was getting long enough to perm again, to get my _Felicity _hair back. Not as tight as Barbara's curls, but close enough that we could be _sosia_. I made a mental note to email her about today when I got back to my dorm. Unless I stayed here…

"Do you think we can have a sleepover?" I asked, giving him a kiss.

He frowned, sitting up and tugging me with him. "I'll ask—it all depends on if his girlfriend and him made plans. I mean, you stayed over last, so it's his turn to have a _coccolissima_." A girl to cuddle.

I pouted, hauling myself off of the bed, using his arms as ropes. "You know, you could always come visit _me_. I think you're overreacting about how people would treat you."

"Pretty girl, Duke fans aren't called the Cameron _Crazies_ for no good reason, okay?" he said, narrowing his eyes. "Y'all are cracked, just batshit up and down."

I blew him a raspberry as he shut off the lights in the room and walked into the hallway. As he locked the door, I slipped my fingers over the waistband of his slacks. "Dad is really happy to see you—well, he said, 'I'm looking forward to seeing Logan.' And in Richard Talk, that's pretty high enthusiasm," I noted.

"Wow," he grinned, slinging his arm down so that his hand was between my pants and the Sisterhood Belt. "Did you check the man's pulse after that? He must have been all flushed after that kind of display of emotion."

"Stop," I said, smacking him hard on his behind. He grabbed my wrist and pulled it around his waist, kissing the top of my head. "I'm just glad that I get to spend the night with my two favorite men."

"So…your dad and Aaron Sorkin? Me and James Hillman?" he teased.

I gasped, clutching him hard as we walked out the door. "You do want to marry me," I squealed.

"I know the way to your heart is through your favorite psych theorist," he declared. As we turned around the building, and the car came into view, he slowed his pace. "Hey—that got me thinking—that, and I talked to Nick this morning on IM? Anyway. You know how Nick asked Mr. Hirsch if he could marry Barbara? Would you want me to do that? Ask your dad?"

"You mean, tonight?" I squeaked.

"No, Mary Anne, like, closer to when I do it—I mean, that's assuming Mandy Moore doesn't show up," he amended, staring into the distance with a hopeful look.

I rolled my eyes, "Yes, yes, you two are meant to be." I felt a pinking wave sweep through my body: when would he ask? Probably senior year. Maybe my birthday? My twenty-first, that big milestone. We could buy a bottle of wine at dinner, couldn't we. I knew Logan, I knew he'd plan something big and romantic, that was his style. He was such a mushball about things. About me.

My breath felt hot over my tongue. "I would, angel. I would like you to ask him before you do. I mean, on the most remote of all chances that he said no? Then I pull a total veto, just know that right now," I warned.

"You don't think he'd say no, do you?" Logan said, his voice thickened with worry. "I mean, it's not like I'd be asking you tomorrow, right?"

"I don't—I just want you to know that it's my choice, and I choose you. Dad…we can never be sure where his head is at, can we?" I sighed, holding him tighter. Not like my love, my lover, my Logan—he always told me what he was thinking, even when his mind was racing in seven directions at once. "But yes, I do want you to ask him. I want Dad to know that he matters so much to me that he's a part of it."

He nodded, pressing his lips to the top of my head again. He got into the backseat while I came around to the front. As I clicked my seatbelt across my body, Dad looked up from his file and turned around to offer his hand to my boyfriend, their palms pressing together in hello. Not a hug. Not my dad. But this was enough, I thought, watching Logan sink back into his seat with a grin.

"I'm sorry I kept you waiting, Richard, I had to finish up my calc," Logan apologized. "How was your flight?"

"Fine, fine," Dad answered. "You were doing your homework on a Friday?"

"Yeah—I try to get it done right after class, while I still remember everything," Logan shrugged. "That, and we have a game tomorrow. So, I have to make sure I'm ahead of the ball, not just on top of it. So to speak," he added, his cheeks splotching with red.

"I hope you do that, Annie," Dad noted, tapping his fingers against the file. "Staying on top of your schoolwork, not saving it for the last minute."

"Are you kidding? Tess is the most organized person I know—you're, what, two readings ahead in all of your classes? Really, Richard, she sets an example for me," Logan said, reaching forward to squeeze my left shoulder.

Dad gave me a smile, and I tried not to glow under his gaze. His face, though, sank into confusion. "'Tess?' Where did that come from?"

"From _tesorina_," I explained. "It's Italian for 'little treasure.' He's been calling me that forever now, you know that, I bet. But Tess is monosyllabic, and so it's kinda gained traction." And he said he could never call me _sweetie_ or _honey_ or _dear_ because of what those words meant to old girlfriends, and I hated the name _baby_. Made me feel small, helpless. Not for this Mary Anne.

Dad stared at the two of us and then began to laugh, a long, hard rumble from deep below his belly. I startled, and Logan's hand clenched my shoulder in surprise. I watched Dad slap his knee and howl away. When he calmed down into gasps, he admitted, "All this time, I thought he was calling you _Teresa_. I kept saying to Sharon, 'What do you think it means, this Teresa?' But we felt stupid for asking, so we just played along. Oh, she's going to get such a kick out of this!"

I began to giggle, until it burst out of me in a huge, gulping laugh, and behind me, I heard the muffled sound of Logan covering up how hard _he_ was laughing with his hands. My father began to snicker before the bellows came back out, and we drove down the road, so happy, so wrapped in the red light of the moment. My lungs were tight from laughing, but I couldn't stop. I was here, I was happy, with my two favorite men.

The one I knew as well as myself, and the one I so desperately wanted to understand.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It wasn't until I arrived at the airport in New York from Chicago that I realized: I had no way to get from the airport in Stamford to home. I didn't want to call Jeff or Sharon—Sharon was at work in New Haven, so Jeff wouldn't have a car. I had a vision of him charging up the highway with the Pike triplets, and I shuddered. I couldn't handle that.

Dr. Paves was on vacation with her husband. Miranda was with her parents in Vermont. Emily's parents were great, but that was asking too much. _Hi, it's your daughter's best friend; can you pick me up at the airport?_ Barbara's sister was at work. At my father's office. That was out. All of the Brunos were in Louisville, even Rose, so that she and Lyman could put an offer on the Keaton house back in Belknap. I drummed my fingers against the armrest of the chair, waiting for my connection to be announced. Who did I know in town?

My old boyfriend Pete? No way. Kristy? In D.C. Abby? At Indiana—she and Logan emailed every so often, and I knew she was on campus all summer. Claudia? Would I really want that?

I flipped my phone open and pulled a phone number from deep inside of my memory. 203-555-1693. It rang a few times before a breathless voice answered.

"_Buenos tardes_," a man sang.

"Eddie? It's May. Spier. I have a bit of a…well, I have a straight up favor to ask," I began, and the moment I said _I need a ride_, he said, _What time_.

There was a line between a patient and a doctor. We had erased that, hadn't we.

My chemo pump beeped, and I trudged off to the bathroom to detach it from the strap that held it in place. I zipped it back into its case, taking my oral round with a scoop of tap water. I glanced at myself in the mirror—the dress was perfect, covering the pregnancy. Other than the circles under my eyes, you would never know what was going on under my skin.

The baby kicked, a murmur of movement. I reached into my purse and pulled out my makeup kit, spreading concealer on the dark mounds under my eyes. Mascara, lipstick, a little bit of gloss. I gazed at my reflection—I looked like myself. Thin, but not so tired anymore. I put my hand on my belly, trying to feel the baby from the outside. Not yet.

"I'm your mommy," I whispered, rubbing a circle over where its feet were bleating against me. "Are you my match? Are you going to save me?"

That's not fair. That's not right, to ask so much of a baby. All I wanted was it to be here with me.

I went back to the gate, fiddled with my knitting for a moment, but instead pulled my phone back out. I punched in a text message, _Are you busy?_ And a moment later it rang.  
"Hey, husband," I smiled, swinging my legs over the empty seat next to me. "What's up?"

"Nothing much—I took Hunt and Kerry on down to the lake, and I'm watching the two of them have races across the open water. It's patently ridiculous Bruno competition," he said, and I could hear him shift around, the deck chair scraping against the concrete.

"So, Mr. Bruno, why aren't you in the middle of it?" I giggled.

"Are you kidding? Of course I was. But they got tired of racing for second place, and I got kicked out of the competition. Wusses," he sniffed.

"You are terrible," I told him, leaning against the phone as if I could touch him that way.

He laughed, and his breath whistled out of his nose. "You in New York?"

"Yeah," I said. "I miss you."

"_Tesorina_, we just talked a few hours ago when you were at O'Hare—I'm not that amazing. Almost, but not quite," he teased. He stopped short of another word and asked, "Are you getting scared?"

"A little," I admitted. "I called Sharon in Chicago after we talked, and she said that she'd be home at six. And she said she'd have Jeff come home, too. I guess he's practically moved in at the Pikes'. She's joking that without Mallory around, the Pikes have a hole to fill? But she sounds really upset about it. I mean, not to defend Dad right now, but I don't think that Jeff gives him a chance. They've never had issues—Jeff just finds Dad to be annoying, and he's never really hidden that very well."

"No, no, I agree," Logan said. "Back in eighth grade, if you had asked me if Richard was a bad guy, I would have said no. Stuffy, uptight, sure. But not bad. Jeff really resented that move to the East, and I think he colored a lot of thing in a negative light because of that. And your dad was one of them. I mean, before this summer, I wouldn't say that Jeff even liked _you_, so there's no way he could claim righteous indignation on your behalf with all of the shit that happened with the first cancer go-round."

"Are you two really okay again? He just admires you so much," I sighed.

"We're okay," Logan promised. "I mean, you heard Kerry, and she never lies. He didn't try to force her, he was just…trying. I'm not pleased at _all_ with what happened, and I'm really not thrilled about how he made me feel about myself when it came to sex and all, but if he needs advice on colleges and stuff, I'll help him. And…what you said about him and Carol—I can't imagine that happening with my own parents and how it would mess with me. He's just a kid, you know? I don't think I can be his best buddy, not yet, but I guess if he called just to talk, I wouldn't hang up."

"I think you're being very generous," I told him. "I would understand if you needed a lot more space than that. I'm going to talk to him about how he treated you. Jeff has that same lashing out instinct that Dawn has, you know, hurting the people who are closest to him? I swear, the Schafers pride themselves on their independence, and sometimes, it gets weird."

"Yeah," he agreed. I heard his mouth open and close. I waited for him until he said, "You remember where we keep the spare key, right?"

I startled slightly. "Back porch, below the propane tank on the grill. Why?"

"Just in case things get really bad with Richard. You don't have to stay there," he stated. "Like me not staying if Dad got…Dad. Seriously, Mary Anne. Spend the night at our place—it's like Dr. Paves says, when there's a bad situation, you have no obligation to make it right. You have to take care of yourself."

"I hope it doesn't come to that," I whispered.

"Me, too," he sighed. "But still."

"Okay." I let out a breath, my lips flapping loudly. "What time are you home tomorrow?"

"What time does your flight land?" he replied.

"Um…two? No. Two-fifteen," I said, digging in my purse to glance at the ticket.

"I'll be at the airport to pick you up—I'll meet you at baggage claim," he told me. "I'm thinking I'll try to get out of here around five, so yeah."

I counted on my fingers and rolled my eyes. "Are you insane?" I squeaked. "An eight-something hour drive _plus_ working your first shift at the bar? Come on, you'll be an exhausted heap by ten at night!"

"Come on, pretty girl, you know me. I'll go to bed at nine tonight—as long as I get four hours of sleep, I'm good for twenty hours at least. And then, I'm sleeping like I'm getting paid by the hour on Saturday. I'll be fine. Just get to that airport, or else I will be very sad," he said, and I could hear the pout in his voice.

I giggled, mentally giving him a push. "Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I'm wondering who you love more, me or that car of yours. You were talking quite sweet to it, you know."

"I changed its oil today—it loved the feel of my hands," he said, a purr on his voice.

"I can understand that," I said, snaking my tongue out of my mouth. "I think it's been two long weeks since we had any quality time, angel. And I think we got ourselves a perfect situation on Friday—Stacey at the library, Dawn and Henry at a Bulls game…if you're not too tired from spending all of that time romancing the Jeep over the interstate, that is."

"Well, the car and I have been together longer," Logan said slowly. "Our relationship is a deep, deep thing between man and piece of shit. I don't know if—okay, you talked me into it." His smile baked on my face, and I curled my palm against the phone as if it were his cheek. "I saw that Stacey and Dawn bought you a new one of that polka dotted gown. That'd be nice."

"We could negotiate that," I shrugged. I traced a circle around my knee. "Though we could save it. It's two months next weekend."

"I know," he breathed. "I hope we never stop celebrating it by the month. My parents do something every month on the sixteenth, even if it's something little, like dancing out on the porch by themselves to their wedding song. I really love that about them."

"That's really sweet," I smiled. "Well, we'll have to figure out how we want to spend the day—I have some ideas, so we might have to flip a coin over who gets to plan what. Regardless, I want it to be just us, no work, no friends, nobody."

"Oh, count me freakin' in for that," he laughed. "I think you and me gotta start having dates again, too."

"Yeah," I said, biting against the curve of my lips. "That drive from the Lou to Carbondale was really great, just us together. I want more of that, especially before school begins and we get all crazy busy."

"But even then, I think we need to carve out one night a week for just us. It means a lot to me," Logan stated. "Even if it's you and me and our homework and macaroni, I want that."

I breathed in sharply, putting my hand over my mouth. "Logan-style macaroni?"

"Is there any other kind?" he snorted. "Okay, Kerry's fancy macaroni, but come on. Not as good as mine. Adding milk is for chumps, honestly. God meant for Kraft mac and cheese to be made with butter and butter alone, the end."

"Angel, when you fall down dead from a blocked artery at forty, I am not going to feel sorry for you," I giggled. "Butter macaroni, ice cream, and Oreos. When you stop working out five hours a day, you are going to be in a world of hurt."

"Whatever, I—oh, well, looky here. It seems like some people actually want me to come back in the water," Logan said in a snarl.

"Kick their asses," I demanded, thumping a fist against my leg. "Show those siblings who's boss."

"Kerry. Kerry's boss," he said with a groan. "Anyway. Call me?"

"I will. I love you—and I miss you," I added, scratching the back of the phone in a heart shape.

He smiled again, I could feel it. "I miss you, Ms. Mary Anne Spier. And I love you. I'll talk to you later."

"Bye," I murmured, closing the phone. Mary Anne Spier. My name. As the flight was announced for boarding, I shuffled from the gate into the plane, rolling it over in my head. Spier, Spier. I was the last Spier. Logan was so adamant that I keep my last name because he knew how much it meant to me. The last Baker and the last Spier.

Why didn't it matter to Dad?

Eddie was waiting for me at the arrivals curb. He gave me a quick hug before shoving my suitcase in the backseat. "So, I had this idea," he said instead of hello.  
"Yeah?" I said, narrowing my eyes.

"It is twenty after five, and I was thinking—there happens to be this thing at the hospital that will be ending right about when we get into Stoneybrook, maybe you'd want to make a quick cameo," he said, raising his eyebrow.

"Group!" I squealed, grabbing his arm. "Will I know anyone?"

"Four of them," he nodded. "Including our new Group leader. Well, one of them. We have three now. You'd be so proud, they use your outlines and everything. Starting that up was one of your best ideas, Mary Anne."

I blushed, knocking my head against the window. "It came from a selfish place, Eddie. I didn't want to be alone with all of this. I wasn't being, like, some really good person."

"We have twenty kids in Group from eight different therapists in town," Eddie stated. "That's twenty kids who know that it's okay to have something wrong, that it's not okay to keep things a secret. I don't care if you started it to impress your boyfriend, the fact is, It's here, and it's helping so many kids." He glanced at me. "Therapy is a strength of yours, Mary Anne, why don't you want to be a therapist?"

I looked down at the lace of my fingers. "I'm not—I'm not well, Eddie. How can I help someone put the pieces of their life together when I'm always scrambling around with mine? I thought I had Mary Anne under control, but I've fallen apart this past month, and it makes me more certain than ever that I can't be the person who says, 'Trust me, I can help you get your life back together.' In Group, we all know that we are flawed. Group here, Group at cancer camp. But a therapist? You give them money, and you give them your self, and you want them to make sense of it. How is it fair to ask someone for that when I struggle with it myself?"

"Because the best therapists know what it's like," Eddie pressed. "They know what it's like to be lost, to find their way back to themselves. I swear, Mary Anne, I'm sold that you have a chemical imbalance, it's permanent, it's like…my epilepsy. I have to take medication, I keep my body healthy to manage my disease. You need medication for yours. You might always need someone to talk to as well, but you just need to stay stable. And there's no shame in that, God, no."

"But—when I first started going to Ellen Reese, she seemed so perfect. And you and Dr. Paves, you all seemed to know the answers," I protested. "I don't have answers."

"May, we didn't have answers," Eddie sighed. "All we do is help you make a mirror to look back at yourself. Help you see what you can't—or won't—see. If you know how to help a person through the conundrum that is their own life, it doesn't matter what's going on inside of your own head. It's not about you, it's about _them_. Everyone has said that you're a great listener. You make mirrors, Mary Anne, just by being you. It's your gift."

I swallowed, putting my hand in front of the air conditioning vent, letting the cool air spill over my skin. "A gift?"

"Yes. It's a gift," he repeated, his voice soft. His eyes rained on me as he turned onto the interstate. "And I think it's time that you realized how talented you really are at this. It's not just hard work, Mary Anne. It's more."

The interstate was jammed with cars, and we sat there for a long time in silence, the rush of the air in the car like a lullaby. I finally told him, "I'm feeling better lately, Eddie."

"Good," he murmured, rubbing my shoulder.

I looked down at my feet. "Ana—Dr. Paves—she said that I'm her favorite patient."

"You are," he smiled. "You're one of my all-time faves, but not number one. But you remind me of her." His face clouded over, and he rocked his breath over his teeth. "Back in Durham, when I was interning. She was one of my first real patients. She was an artist, used to take Slinkies and pull them apart, making collages out of them."

I could see Eddie's desk, the Slinky that sat on the laminated top. How he would race it back and forth between his hands when he was agitated, when he was thinking something difficult through. Her.

"She was bipolar, and her parents were just nutjobs, full on asses, and I kept thinking that I was getting through to her. I decided I was going to save her, that she was going to be a brilliant artist, and she was going to be okay. And she had a really good stretch of about two months, and then she hung herself in her closet with a belt." His shoulders drooped down. "No note. Just dead."

"I'm so sorry," I whispered, my eyes burning but dry.

Eddie gripped the wheel tight as he stared at the maze of taillights. "Nellie used to joke with me, talk with me about my life. I really felt like she cared about me as a person, and not just her doctor. It made me want to save her even more than anyone else. And I realized that you can't do that. Everyone deserves that, or else you're not being true to your profession. But that reminds me of you—they way you wanted to get to know me and Ana, understand us. I felt loved whenever you were in session with me, even when we were angry at each other and shouting over your meds or whatever."

"I do love you and Dr. Paves. Ana. It's so hard to call her that," I admitted.

"My sister really adores you," he said. "You were the first research assistant to not quit after a month. And, you came back each year. You made us a mirror, Mary Anne, and we loved the people we saw back—someone to be admired, someone good. And I screw up a lot in my personal life, so it was really neat to work with you and see a guy who you trusted that much."

Eddie's hand met my own. "No matter what happens with your dad, you have Analisa, May. You have Sharon, of course, but you have Ana, too, even if she's in Seattle."

"She wants me to stand on my own," I murmured, glancing up at him.

"All parents want their kids to fly," Eddie smiled. "You sometimes are still the little girl searching for validation, and Ana and I both don't want to see that in you, not when you're much stronger than that. So, yeah. Parents push you to do things on your own that you are capable of. But they are still there for advice and support. If your dad punks on you again, don't feel afraid or alone for a parent."

I sniffed, "What about you?"

"Girl, my name is on your pill bottles. Professional distance," he barked, sliding his hand away. I laughed, leaning against the window again. "Why don't you nap, okay? If we get to the 'Brook before six, we'll go to the hospital. If not, we'll go straight to your place."

Just the suggestion of sleep cradled my bones into weariness. "Who would I know at Group?" I yawned.

"Robert and Erica—they're both home for the summer. Amy, our weekend Group leader. And Claudia been back on and off this summer," Eddie answered.

I nodded. I thought she would be. I sighed against the cold glass and fell asleep.

He shook me awake when we reached the hospital, taking the elevator and not the stairs up to the psych ward. I used to bound up those stairs, my legs so thick with energy. That was going to be the first goal for when I was healthy: get back to running. I had walked on to the cross-country team freshman year but never made the cut for the travel squad—I was too busy running for me and not for a race. Still, it was something that I could say that I tried. Tried and failed, maybe, but the old Mary Anne, she never would have mustered the courage to be told _no_.

I wasn't so perfect all of the time, was I.

Eddie tapped on the door to the Group room, opening the door when a girl's voice called out, "Who is it?"

"Me," he grinned. "And a special cameo by the Group's founder herself." He held out a finger and slipped into the room. After a moment, he held the door open and beckoned me inside.

"Mary Anne," Amy breathed, jumping up from the head of the table and grabbing me in a large hug. I grinned into her hair, rocking back and forth on my toes as we clenched to each other. "How are you doing, May? How's Duke?"

"Okay, and fantastic," I answered, pulling back to look at her. "Love the haircut. I'm such a fan of short hair myself."

"Yeah?" she said, fluffing the short ends of her hair, knocking against her cheeks. "My friend Tiffany totally dared me, but I love it."

"Me, too," I nodded. I glanced past her to where Erica Blumberg sat, her fingers covered in paint.

She raised her hand and waved. "I would totally hug, but I can't," she lamented. "We finger painted a bit of aggression up on the wall."

I looked behind her, to the mess of blues and oranges and yellows. Erica had sketched a self-portrait of herself, eyes closed, face serene. She was an artist, wasn't she—I always felt a bit sorry for her, lost in the shuffle between Claudia and Ashley Wyeth in their battle to be the most talented at SHS.

"We were putting up how we felt right now, right in this minute," Amy supplied.

There were ten paintings up there, and I noticed the other people around the table. My heart sank as I recognized Norman Hill, Melody Korman, Vanessa Pike. Old charges of mine from the BSC days. Parents had stopped calling me because there was a rumor that I was insane, and who wanted a crazy girl to sit their kids?

Kids that were now hurting, just like I had once.

They were looking at me, faces pink with shame, and I heard myself saying, "I'm in therapy back in Durham still. Still on my meds, still working at being me."

"It's a process," Amy sighed.

"It takes a lot," Vanessa murmured, scraping her thumb along the edge of the table. My heart chipped away, staring at her. What had happened? I remember Kerry saying that Vanessa had slept with Buddy Barrett while they were still in middle school—_middle school_. Why? What had made her do that, what was wrong?

Where was Mallory to help her? Nobody talked to her anymore, not even Jessi. Was Vanessa all alone? Her brothers were running wild all over Stoneybrook, but Jeff swore they were all pretty straight-edge under it all, making good grades and never really getting into major trouble. Did Vanessa fall into their shadow, was she forgotten in the mess of her siblings?

"I'm glad this is still here," I murmured. "I'm really glad."

"Me, too," Melody said, her smile so small on her lips. "It helps."

Eddie put his hand on my shoulder. "Well, you guys have to do goals, so we'll get out of your hair. Just wanted to say hi and all, right, May?"

"Right," I smiled. I let my eyes fall on Erica again. "Congrats on the season—Rutgers did great last year."

She beamed. "It's been a lot of fun—college is so much better than SHS, for sure. Want me to tell Robert that you said hi?"

My grin bloomed. "Oh, yeah! He's doing well at Penn State? You two still together?"

Erica blushed, her dark hair dashing across her face. "We are _so_ together. It's kinda lame—my teammates call him 'my husband.' He actually plays on the Ultimate Frisbee team there, and he's just totally doing great with class and stuff. We're both doing really awesome—you still with Logan? I mean, talk about a great year, he totally rocked."

I wanted to fling out my left hand, I wanted to rub my belly. I wanted to glow over about us. But this wasn't about Mary Anne, not now. I needed to leave. "Yeah, we're still together. And I'll tell him you said that." I turned my head up to Eddie. "Um, it was nice to see you. Thanks for letting me come by."

"Anytime, May," Amy chirped, waving her hand, the scars on her arm faint now. I wonder how long it had been since the last time she had hurt herself like that. She seemed so happy, so in control. But you could be and lose it in a moment.

I knew.

"You didn't tell them about the cancer and baby and all," Eddie said as we walked to the elevators.

"Yeah, well, I could have shared? But then I would have taken over. It wasn't my place to do that, Eddie. It wasn't my time to speak," I answered, watching the lights blink to life above the doors.

We drove through downtown, past the shops and restaurants of my childhood. The Rosebud, Uncle Ed's, The Argo, Friendly's, Bellaire's, the Merry Go Round. They reached in and tickled my memory, creating a yellow-wrapped nostalgia that almost felt warm. But behind me and those things was a sheet of glass, cool from the air of the car, and I felt so far away from it all. Once, I was young and Stoneybrook was all I could see. After the fire, Dad and Sharon contemplated leaving here, and I had been distraught. Of course: my whole life was here.

Then I turned fourteen, went with Dr. Paves to North Carolina, took my life in my hands and shaped it into something large and beyond even my wildest imagination. I began making lists of things that I wanted to do when I grew up, dreams that took me far past Stoneybrook. I wanted to go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I wanted to get my PhD. I wanted to learn how to make gourmet foods like soufflé and crème brule. I wanted to get married, own a house, have kids. And that husband, that house, those children—I didn't confine them to this town.

My face pressed hard against the glass. This was where I grew up. And now I had grown past.

By the time we reached my house, I felt ill. The chemo sickness rising up from my body. My stomach was rocking with the promise of vomit, and I struggled to keep it down until I had raced from the car, leaning behind a bush and retching out half of my late lunch.

Eddie came up behind me, rubbing my back, as Jeff raced out of the house. "Are you okay?" Jeff panted, squatting down next to me.

"Just chemo," I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry."

"I'll get her bag," Jeff told Eddie. I straightened up and gave my doctor a long hug, as he whispered a goodbye in my ear. He didn't say anything else, not in front of my stepbrother—he just squeezed my shoulder and winked, stepping back to his car.

I turned to Jeff, taking the arm he offered me. "Thanks—it's nice to see you."

"It's nice to see you, too," he said, giving me a small grin. "Are we okay?"

"You and me? Yes and no," I admitted as he led us up to the porch. Jeff gestured to the swing, and I settled down on it, tucking my right leg against my chest and hugging it tight. I gave a light push on the ground with my left foot and sighed. "Jeff, I'm not really happy with you about Logan. What you said to him about being, what, a hypocrite for sleeping with me in high school? For being weak for not screwing around when he had the chance during our freshman year of college?" I took in a breath and stared at him. "I don't like the way you treat women, Jeff, and I know it's wrapped up in Carol, and the way you lashed out at my husband, who treats women with respect, was really uncool."

"How do I treat women?" Jeff said, narrowing his eyes.

"They're conquests," I said, curling my lips. "Things. Things to be had and used. I mean, it's one thing to be—well, my friend Tim would call it 'randy,' but it's another to not even, like, think about the girls that you're with, at least to me. Kerry thought you actually liked her, and that's what hurt her the most. When she realized that you just wanted a hook-up and not her."

Jeff rolled his head back. "I _did_ like her. I thought she liked me. Sex isn't a big deal, and we didn't have to go all the way, maybe just a little third base, right?"

"But Jeff," I insisted, "if you treat the girls you like and the girls you don't like in the same way, what's the difference? Sex means nothing to you, right, so why in the world would you want to just do it with someone that you like? Especially someone that wants to wait?"

"May, I swear, I thought she was just giving me a line. I thought she was trying to prove something to Logan, maybe. They're so competitive, maybe it was her way to stick it to him—look at me, the better Catholic, ha ha," Jeff said, waving his hands back and forth. "I swear, I thought it was an act, that she'd drop it when we were alone—that the hard-to-get routine would stop. And I guess…I was really wrong, and I told her that, and she accepted my apology." Jeff ran his hands though his hair. "Mom—I told her what happened, and she held my hand when I called Logan and Kerry. She was really great."

I licked my lips and pushed swing again. "When will you tell her about Carol." Not a question. He had to.

Jeff closed his eyes. "On Monday—I already asked her to dinner, just me and her." His face wrinkled with misery. "Dawn's gonna be so pissed, but Mom, she just forgives me and listens, and I can't hold on to this anymore. I really hurt Kerry that night, and I heard myself telling you about Carol, and it all got twisted in my head, and what if I—I met this girl yesterday, okay, at The Argo? Tiffany. Totally hot babe, just selling her shit like it was clearance time at the store, if you get my drift, right, and I thought inside of myself, what if she and I were hitting it, and then she said no, but I didn't listen because all I could hear in my head was Carol?"

Jeff let out a tear-framed breath. "I don't want to be that guy. Logan and I really were tight for a while, and I don't think he'll ever see me the same. I mean, Dawn's always bagging on him, but we really got along, and I didn't mean to insult him, I was just like—hey, for once, I've got more experience, let _me _be the smart one for once, teach him a little. And it's all fucked up now. I ruined that, May. I don't want to hurt a girl like that, you have to believe me."

"I know," I murmured, taking his hand and holding it against my leg.

"The idea of Mom making me come back here makes me sick, okay. Your dad bugs me, this place is cold, everyone here always has such a stick up their ass, but I can't go back to that house with that woman. And how she treats my father. My dad is really fucking cool," Jeff said, ducking his head. "He doesn't deserve that."

"I can't tell you how things are going to go, Jeff, but I'm glad you're going to tell Sharon. Your mom has helped me so much, I can't even say," I said, squeezing his hand.

Jeff titled his head. "Will you ever call Logan's mom 'Mom?' I mean, I get that she's your mother-in-law, and Kerry said that you and her got along really well, but will you ever call her that?"

"No," I said. "My mother is dead. That's _her_ name."

He exhaled hard. "Mom wants you to call her that. She's told that to Dawnie and me."

"I know, I can guess," I mumbled, looking away. "I feel like I'm disappointing her, but I can't help it. Sharon is a mother to me, but she's not Mom. Does that make sense? I can't use that word. And you can pass along to her that Rose—Mrs. Bruno—isn't my mom either. Maybe she'll be like a mother to me, but Sharon is very special. I'm very lucky to have her." I put my other hand on his. "We both are."

Jeff swung us back and forth for a moment, holding our hands together. "Your dad is inside. Mom's talking to him, trying to get him to promise he'll be cool. Are you ready to go in?"

"No. But yes, too," I said. "Jeff? If for some reason I have to get out of here, real quick, could you bring my suitcase over to the Brunos? If for some reason I don't answer their door, just leave the bag on the back porch."

He let out a low whistle. "You're really expecting the worst, aren't you?"

"I'm just planning for it, just in case. I have hope, though," I said with a weak smile.

Jeff didn't let go of my hand, gripping it tight. "If he hits you, if he touches you again, I'll kill him. I will. You thought Logan was angry the other night over Kerry? I'll show him up like you wouldn't believe it—and no one will hold me back, sis."

I looked at him while I breathed. I couldn't say thank you, I couldn't make those words leave my mouth, but I thought it. I willed him to see it, the lift of my love for him. Stepbrother, brother. We were together in this.

I nodded, standing up. Jeff picked up my bag with one hand, putting his other hand in the small of my back as I opened the front door. Dad and Sharon stood up from their chairs in the living room, and Sharon rushed up to me.

"Are you okay? Jeff yelled out that he saw you get ill," she worried, holding me tight to her body. I could feel the race of her pulse under her skin, and I wished that I didn't have to bring her into this. Why couldn't the circle of people just stay small?

"I had two doses of chemo today. It just reared its head," I shrugged, kissing her cheek. "How are you?"

"Sold a house today," she smiled, rubbing my arms. "Work is great. That's always a comfort. Dawn still good to you?"

"She's Dawn," I grinned. "We need to talk out about the rest of the year."

Sharon held my chin in her hands. "We'll discuss that over the phone, later," she promised, glancing over at my father. "Would you like something to eat? Drink?"

"Not right now," I said, drawing back from her to turn to Dad. "Hi, Dad."

"Mary Anne," he nodded, sitting back down. "How was your flight?"

I shrugged. "Good." Stay polite. Stay formal. We could ease into this. "I saw my old friends from the Yale hospital down in Carbondale. It was really nice."

"I'm glad," he replied, smoothing his hands over his tie. We stared at each other in an icy silence before he sighed, pointing at the couch. "You can sit, if you'd like."

Sharon put her hands on my shoulder. "Would you like me to stay?" she asked.

"No, Sharon, Mary Anne and I will be fine," Dad said, slicing the air with his withering tone. "Why don't you and Jeff go into the kitchen? I'm sure if I'm too horrible for her, she'll yell for you."

"That's not fair," I shot at him. "You're the one who slapped me."

Dad raised an eyebrow. "To which your husband then battered me against a wall. Not exactly a fair exchange of force. I had a lump on my head for a week, what did you lose, pride?"

"Richard," Sharon hissed, but Dad held up a hand.

I stepped away from her and sat on the couch. I stayed as still as I could for a moment, trying to sooth my nerves. "I wanted to thank you for continuing to pay my insurance bills. I appreciate that a lot."

Dad shook his head, a disgusted look on his face. "What, did you think I would stop? Mary Anne, if I stopped paying, either I'm dooming you and your ill-conceived marriage to certain bankruptcy, or you'll start compromising your care so that your co-pays don't exceed a certain amount. It's tantamount to suicide. You need excellent care, and I won't let you die." His face tremored for a moment, and he added, "I won't fail Alma like that."

"Why is my marriage 'ill-conceived?'" I said, narrowing my eyes.

"You're nineteen years old, and obviously, you and he couldn't even master the basics of birth control, and I'm supposed to believe that you could enter into marriage?" Dad snorted. "Yes, Mary Anne, let me jump for joy over this."

"He knows me," I spat. "When I get sick, and I can't speak for myself, someone has to make the tough decisions—what do you do? You fall apart. Two weeks ago, a tumor in my lung ruptured, and I hemorrhaged and passed out, and they asked him for permission for a procedure to prevent a heart attack. You know, that thing? That killed me once? What would you have done—what you always do, freeze up and abandon me. There wasn't time for that, Dad, they needed to operate in that moment, and my oh-so-incompetent _husband_ signed the consent forms, and I'm alive right now thanks to him."

I ran my hand over my face. "Why do you hate me for being sick, Daddy? I can't help this—why do you hate me?"

"I don't hate you," Dad said, his back as stiff as a knife. "I just can't believe that you're going to have a child and bring it into this. I'm horrified by that, Mary Anne. After what you've seen me go through, after the kind of struggles that we have had, I can't believe you would do that to a baby."

"What if I got pregnant in…two years, after graduation? My relapse potential is at ninety percent," I told him. "When I left UNC three years ago, they said I could pretty much guarantee a relapse before the five year mark, and nearly certain for me to get cancer again before thirty-five. I have Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, I'm racing against time here, hoping that they find a cure before it one day tears me down. So what, Dad? Do I never have a baby because I will probably get sick again? Do I never get to have a family?"

"No, you shouldn't," Dad hissed. His eyes blackened as he pointed at me. "You can't abandon your family like that, it's not fair to them. You just had to get married, and maybe it's good that it's Logan, I've met his father, and that man is a real piece of work, insulting his son as if it were a normal thing to tear your child down in front of strangers. In Logan, you have a damaged man, and—"

"He's not damaged!" I screamed. "Don't you ever say that about him. He's a better man that you—you broke my heart, Dad, you killed me when you drove away."

"How's it going to feel when you die, leaving your child behind with only his father to take care of her, huh? What, you going to name your baby Mary Anne, as if that will make it okay?" he yelled.

I covered my face with my hands, trying to force my lungs to catch the air and stop skipping out of my body. I wrenched my hands through my curls and gripped hard at my hair, trying to get control, trying to grab hold of _something_ to get control.

But my hands slipped. When I brought my fingers down, they were full of wispy bits of my hair. I stared up at Dad, still gasping for air, and he stared at my hands. I uncurled my fingers, and my hair snowed down onto the carpet.

Dad blinked at it. "I'll have to vacuum that," he mumbled.

"You'll have to _vacuum_ it?" I choked. I ran my hands through my hair again and flung the shedding bits down to the ground. "This is a part of _me,_ Dad, I'm devolving right in front of your eyes, I'm begging you to love me because I might die—I might have died two weeks ago, and my baby died, and I'm here, and all you can say to me is, 'I'll have to _vacuum_ it?'" I jumped to my feet, grinding the bits of my hair into the carpet as I snatched my purse. "I am not Alma, and Logan is not you, and we are not doomed to repeat your miserable life."

I glared at him from the other side of the couch, his frame hardening into a lump of steaming anger as he stared back at me. "If you think I'm so selfish and bad, stop paying my bills—you've already failed Mom in how you treat me, what's the big difference, huh? I'll make it work, I don't need your obligation. You know what? You can just forget I exist. I'm as dead as Mom now. Congratulations, Richard, because you don't have a daughter anymore."

"Mary Anne Spier, you get back here and sit down," Dad commanded, jumping to his feet.

"You don't get to tell me what to do anymore—I don't belong to you. You've thrown me aside one too many times—you've tossed me down like I was that lump of hair, and no more," I snapped. "I don't want to be your Annie for one second longer." I opened the front door and stepped through it, bulleting him with my eyes. "And it's not Spier anymore. It's Bruno."

I slammed the door so hard that the house shook in its roar.


	27. Chapter 24

Okay, this is cheesy, but I saw this episode of _The West Wing_ where they said that prayer (or positive thought, if you want to go atheist) can help someone heal? And well…my brother is undergoing major spinal surgery today for his spina bifida—it begins at eight and goes until three in the afternoon, EST, so yeah, it's a biggie. They're trying to save the feeling in his legs, so—call me silly or stupid, and forgive me if you're like, "Get to the ffn, OLB, damn! This ain't Oprah!" But…if you could—give a good thought to my brother? He's _so_ Janine Kishi, but with a cool upgrade. Thanks, yall.

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After one block, my knees went to water, and I waved downward, hitting the concrete of the sidewalk with the sides of my legs. Fists pounded on my chest; I gasped for air through my battered skin. A train was charging through my arms, aiming for my ribs, and the bone bristled as the pain arrowed through to my heart.

This is what it feels like to break your heart.

I was still breathing, though, as my head hit the grass of the Rowdowskys' yard, my hands pressing the thundering in my chest. My left hand, the shine of that gold and that stone that said I was wanted.

I threw my father away. He had shoved me aside, and I shoved him right back. And now I was a bundle of bone and sick blood crashed on the ground. Because I am a bad girl. And bad girls get punished.

No: I stood up for myself. No: honor thy father. No: no one deserves to be treated the way he acted towards me. No: my father is in a nightmare where his wife has come to life in his daughter, only to die again.

To die. Here, to die here. In a town where I don't belong. Not at Group, not in my own home.

My eyes began sinking, waning back into my head, and a blur of red rocketed into my vision. Red like blood. Red like cherries, tomatoes, strawberries. Strawberries, the sweet, deep, wet scent of berry stroked my skin, and I lifted my left hand up to that mound of hair.

"Barbara," I whispered, my diamond snagging in a curl. "Barbara, save me."

The face came into focus, and she pressed my hand against her pale, freckled face. "I will, Mary Anne. I'm here," she promised. "So stay with me."

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The alarm clock blared, a nasty beep that made my ears curdle. I groaned, rolling around and pressing my face in to Logan's chest as he reached over and slapped the snooze button.

"Why am I getting up at five-thirty in the darned morning? And on the penultimate day of summer vacation no less? Am I insane again?" I mumbled, pulling the blankets up to my neck.

"Because…you and your girls are so freakin' strange about your Waffle Hut tradition?" he answered. "Though, personally? I don't think you're dooming the senior year to failure by pushing breakfast back to, like, seven or something."

"It's too late, Babs is picking me up," I sighed. "I'm so torn—I want to spend all day with the girls? But it hasn't even been, like, twelve hours with you."

His face sharpened in a delighted smile. "I'm more important than the girls?"

"Um, no," I giggled, kissing his pouting lips. He let out a growl and bent his elbows behind my neck, rolling me over and layering his tongue over mine. I pulled back a bit and pressed my nose against his. "Are you trying to get me to pick you?"

He kissed me again and wrote _yes_ on my spine.

"Well, that whole deal about watching that…football show thingie about the Friday and the lights—canceling that might tip things in your favor," I hinted.

"Hell no," he declared. "We made a bargain. I watch _Gilmore Girls_, you watch _Friday Night Lights_. Come on, the article I read said that it's totally for both guys and their girls."

"So, I nominate Kerry as that girl," I replied, kissing the tiny scar under his right eye. "How about I—if I won't be intruding on family time, I can come along with to dinner with the birds, and then we can have the night again. I'm dropping off all of my film, so I can show you all of the faces and pictures from my stories."

"Oh, me, too." He rubbed my shoulders and challenged, "I'll race you to the one hour photo at the drugstore."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Oh, it's so on." Logan raised his eyebrows, but as he opened his mouth, there was a knock on the door. I gasped, sitting up and calling out, "Babs?"

"Lemme in, damn it!" she yelled, banging harder. "I haven't seen you all damn summer!"

"Just a sec, I'm a bit unready," I laughed, kissing him once more before jumping up and gathering my clothes from around the apartment. There was a part of me that wished he could make peace with his father, go back with his family; he loved his brother and sister so much, and his mother meant everything to him, but his father was enough to keep him away. On the other hand, it was pretty great to have a place for just him and me. I watched him staring at me, his thirsty eyes lapping my skin, and I had an urge to dive back into him, so I focused on Barbara waiting outside of the door. Logan and I had been apart all summer—we could make it one more day.

I had never wanted to marry him more in my whole life: if I was married to him, we could have all of the days. Stop it, I scolded myself, pulling up my jeans. You're only sixteen, _relax_. There is plenty of time to think like that. For now, just have fun.

I tugged on a tank top that Stacey bought me at the beginning of the summer, a gigantic cupcake above a crossbones in the middle of the chest. A little anorexia humor, I sighed, staring at my concave stomach. I quick pulled on my bra with the padded inserts that gave me the illusion of breasts. Snagging my scarf and his boxers from the floor near the door, I tossed him his shorts and tied the silk around my head before opening the door.

Barbara barreled into me with the force of fire, and we stumbled down to the floor, squealing and crying and holding each other tight. I ruffled her hair—it had grown back to its original shoulder length and bounced against her bare skin, and she pulled my scarf down a bit. We pulled back up into a sitting position, and she squeezed my hands.

"Oh, my God, best summer ever?" she gasped.

"So totally best summer ever," I agreed. "It's been totally forever since we talked."

Logan snorted, buttoning his cargo pants. "Which, in Mary Anne speak means, what, a week?"

Barbara laughed, pointing at his shirt. "I thought Stacey confiscated all of your Nike gear."

"I restocked this summer—freebies rule," he grinned, helping us to our feet and swinging Barbara in a large hug. "Babs, sweetie, Nick left me with a six page instruction manual on how to be your substitute boyfriend? Do I really have to read _US Weekly?_"

"And _People_," I noted, jumping on the couch. Barbara flopped next to me and nodded. "It's the Bible/"

Logan gasped, spinning around and stalking over to his bed stand. He opened up a drawer and pulled out a leather bound Bible, shaking a finger at it and yelling, "Liar! You said you were The Word! But actually, it's a glossy tabloid!"

"_People_ is not a tabloid," Barbara snapped. She gave me a wounded look, her mouth drooping with sadness. "_People_ is totally upmarket."

"Babsie? No," I told her, patting her head.

Curling on the floor and resting his head on my lap, Logan grabbed Barbara's hand. "I want to hear about the IDF interview—Mary Anne said that it went well? But I want to hear the story."

Barbara shifted her eyes between us, snatching her purse up and hugging it to her chest. "Well," she hedged. "I was going to show this at breakfast? But you're totally not allowed to come," she said to him, "and you _are_ my May, so…" She closed her eyes and whipped out a thick packet of papers, the fold of it knocking against the padding in my bra.

I frowned as I straightened it, edging my eyes at Logan as he nodded, reaching over to the coffee table for my glasses. I put them on and then laughed. "Babs, this is all in Hebrew."

"Oh, shit, right," she giggled. "Sorry! Well, I got this three days ago? And. It says that I am accepted as _Olim_ for _Sherut Sadir_ in the Israeli Defense Force, and this is my report date, 1 August 2007. I have to go to a _Bakum, Basis Klita U'Miyun_, which is an induction center? That's where I get assigned to a branch of the army and get basic training and then additional training in my specialty…and then I get stationed." Barbara bit her lips and spread her arms open. "In other words? _Ashkarah_, kids, they've accepted me for service!"

"Holy Toledo," I breathed, shaking the papers in my hands. "You're going to be a soldier!"

"I am!" she screamed, throwing her arms around me and shaking us together as we snowed down onto the carpet and bleated out sounds that were somewhere above words, too excited for shape and form and the color of grammar.

I jumped back up to my feet. "We have to go tell Randa and Emmy, like, _now_."

"Yes," she grinned, stumbling up to her feet. Everything about her was red—her hair, her cheeks, her shirt. Like a heart, my sweet Barbara.

Why didn't I think red like blood? Because I had lived. So she would, too.

Barbara slung an arm around my waist. "Is it okay if I steal your woman for the whole day?" she asked Logan.

He shrugged, snatching the remote for the television from the end table. "She was yours first, Babs. In fact—may _I_ steal _your_ woman for the night?"

She gave me a serious look, placing a hand around the side of my jaw. "Only if you promise to come back to me," she told me, her voice low and full of a dark, husky weight.

"I'm yours," I swore, tumbling my fingers in her curls.

"Are you two gonna make out?" Logan asked, tipping his head to the side. "I'm not opposed to it? But should probably turn my crucifix over. I don't think Jesus died for this kind of sin."

"If he had, I would be Christian," Barbara laughed. "Can't you just picture the Pope, like, sitting in his little Poffice—that's Pope office, natch—with monitors that show all Catholics around the globe? And when he sees a cardinal sin, he, like, suits up like Batman and jumps into the Popemobile and busts that shit up?"

"Like Batman," Logan gaped.

"He _is_ German—I bet he's a little freaky deaky," Barbara noted, swinging her hips back and forth. "This is the time on _Sprockets_ where we pray."

He stuck out his tongue at her, and I laughed, bending down to kiss him before Barbara and I skipped out. "You are so naughty," I giggled.

"I take notes from you—did you trip the Sin Alarm last night?" she pressed, and I covered my face in my hands, storming down the stairs as she howled behind me. "See, Nicky and I are kinda backing off the whole sex thing—not that we don't like it? But we're so damn nervous, _still_, that it's not very good, so we're back to making out and stuff." She took a deep breath and screwed her eyes shut, her lips growing pale. "I need to talk to Stacey. Like, yesterday. I need a tutorial."

I cocked my head to the left and cupped a hand around my left ear, "Do you hear that? That's Stacey and my sister jumping into the Slutmoblie in their own leather outfits and charging across Stoneybrook to teach you about the birds, the bees, and the nasty."

Barbara exploded with snickered and twirled away from me until she stood a few feet away, staring back at me with the rose-shaded sky to her back. She bit her lips and pointed behind her to the sunrise. "You're facing east," she remarked.

"I am," I replied. "And you are facing west. And this is significant, why?"

My eyes were filled with the blushing sky, where the blue was rolling out over my head and behind me. The clouds were bathed in apricot, dotting out to the horizon as the sun rose in a yellow fist above the line of trees that hid the ocean from the town. Up in Massachusetts this summer, I woke up at five six out of seven days a week, walking around the lake twice before the recording of the trumpet played over the loudspeakers. Before the cancer, I would run this trail, maybe five times in the span of an hour. Now, I huffed my way in two slow ovals, my eyes fixed on the bruise colored surface of the water, how it turned gold in the sunrise pitching over the line of thick pines. The gilded lake—I would dip my hands in it and expect to have it change me like Midas, but my fingers looked the same when I pulled them back out.

And then, under the echo of the trumpet, I would slip into the infirmary and offer my catheter to one of the nurses so they could hook in my first nutrition supplement of the day. I would hook my fingers over the necklace my love gave to me and try not to notice the knobby joints that studded my still-sick body. I would open the print out of his emails, my friends' emails, all of their letters and refuse to get depressed. My battle to regain my normal life began each day in the shadow of sunrise.

With her back to the dawn, Barbara gazed at me. "Next year, you face this way, and I face that way? Because that's how we look at each other. Starting a year from now, this is what we have to do each day. We'll pick a time where we'll both be awake, and we'll make sure to face each other, even if just for a second."

"We can practice all year," I said, reaching for her hand. Barbara whipped her head around and then back, sucking in her cheeks and bugging out her eyes. I giggled, tightening my fingers in hers. "That's Blue Steel, Babsie."

"No, it was Magnum—I turned left," she beamed, leaning forward to kiss my cheek. "Come on, Maybelle. Let's go get our girls."

You're my girl. My best friend. I linked my arm through hers and declared, "This is going to be the best year ever."

"Of course!" she crowed, punching her fist in the air. Then it dropped, brushing back the tail of my scarf. "But May? Our life is so much more than SHS. Hell, every year is going to be better than the last."

Because we will grow up, I thought, taking her hand. Because we will be older, thick with knowledge and our hearts full, so full that our hands can wrap around them. Curl around them and float on.

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By the time the ambulance came, Sharon had arrived—who had called her? Or had she known? That mother's instinct pinging deep in the marrow of her bones.

Marrow. Where blood grows.

"My baby," I gasped, fighting through the cotton padding me in this strange, slow state. "Is my baby okay?"

"You're fine, honey," Sharon told me. Why did she sound so far away? I could hear the echo of Jeff's voice chirping _She's allergic to aspirin? And she's on CHOP for her lymphoma, so you can't give her glycerin_.

"Babs," I murmured, reaching out my hand. "Where's Babs?"

"I'm right here," she stated, curling her fingers with mine. "I'm right here, Mary Anne. Just relax, okay?"

I sighed into the feel of her skin as she pulled her fingers through my curls, my hair peeling away from my scalp with the gentleness of a breeze.

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I slipped my key to Logan's apartment in the lock, knocking softly as I pushed the door open. "Angel?" I called.

"Hey, _tesorina_," he replied, rubbing his fists against his eyes and sliding his glasses back on his face. "I wasn't expecting your tonight."

"We had an emergency," Miranda declared, stomping in behind me with Emily following behind, her arm looped around Barbara's waist. Stacey and Dawn came in, shutting and locking the door behind them.

Logan blinked at me, and I walked over to him, slipping into his lap as he shut his book. "Love, we have a problem," I began. "And we need the safety that comes from not being anywhere near parents."

His head bent around mine, and he stared at Barbara, her splotchy, red-swollen face. Puffed up by an hour of crying. "What's wrong."

"I think I'm pregnant," Barbara wailed, burrowing her head back in Emily's shoulder.

"She needs to take a test, okay, and you don't do something like that where nosy parents might find it. Considering that Stepmonster has a habit of checking the trash to see if Babsie has been 'snacking inappropriately,' we can't do it at her place," Miranda snapped. "That fucking whore, one day, I'm gonna snap Fancy Hirsch in two, just for the record."

Stacey sank onto the couch next to us. "And you know Richard's great hobby is cleaning at inopportune times. My mom walked in on me waiting for a test once, so we can't risk the wrath of Maureen again. So, yeah. Your place is a safe place. Be the safe place, Lee."

"That, and we can drink here while we wait," Dawn reasoned, pulling a bottle of vodka out of her bag. "Can we smoke a joint?"

"No," he scowled.

Dawn rolled her eyes. "You let May do it."

"When she couldn't eat without it, not for, like, shits and giggles," he glared. He stood up, lifting me to my feet. "I'm gonna draw the curtain and go to my bed—just…pretend that I'm not here, okay?"

"You could go to your parents, you know," Miranda pointed out, rubbing Barbara's back in small circles.

I wrapped my arms around his waist and squeezed tight. No, he couldn't. After losing at States last week, Lyman had called his son a failure, a disappointment. _Let's see if UNC will want you now_, he taunted. _Couldn't get the job done_.

And Logan had stood there, hadn't yelled back—Hunter was in the next room, Logan didn't want him to hear his brother scream. My boyfriend was afraid of how far his anger would take him, so he left and drove his car to see me. His face was so calm, so impassive, I knew something was wrong from the moment he stepped in the house, waving at my folks before following me upstairs. Dad had a rule—Logan and I had to keep the bedroom door open, so Logan pulled me to the other side of my desk, sliding down to the carpet where my father wouldn't be able to see us, and he sobbed so long, so hard, I was sure he could never cry again. There would be nothing left in his eyes, his muscles, no more energy to be sad again. It had all emptied out onto my skin as I rocked him in my arms.

_It's not your fault, my angel_, I whispered, kissing his neck, his slick face. _You are not to blame. _

Emily was pulling Barbara's hair back from her wet cheeks, and I could Emily murmuring, "It's not your fault, okay? If it's positive, it was just an accident, this is not your fault."

"He'll never forgive me," she wailed, and I turned around and took her back in my arms, resting my face on her bent head. Her hair was soft like feathers, full of that thin, almost purple smelling berry shampoo, a hint of spring flowers under it all. "I can't be pregnant, I won't be able to report for_ Sherut Sadir_, everything'll get ruined." She sniffed, pulling back and glaring at my sister and Stacey. "This is all _your_ fault!"

Stacey tapped her chest with her index finger. "Me? Babe, I didn't sleep with the guy over Valentine's Day, okay?" You just taught her _how_. Her blonde hair swung in its ponytail as she dug through her bad and pulled out two boxes of pregnancy tests. "Alright, Babs, it's really simple. It's simple 'pee on the stick' stuff."

Dawn handed Miranda and Emily drinks and folded down to the floor, tipping a bottle of beer up to the ceiling against her lips. "Don't pee all at once—I did that when Lewis and I had our little scare, and when I had to redo it? I had to wait a few hours to try again. So—economize."

"You and Lewis?" Emily squeaked. She chugged back a few gulps of her drink. "An Army baby and you?"

"Oh, I know. I felt all swollen with the military industrial complex," Dawn shuddered. "But it was just that I forgot to take the placebo week. It was a blonde moment, not a baby." She reached over and touched Barbara's shaking leg. "I swear, Babs, this is a mistake."

"The condom ripped," she whispered into my ear.

"I know it did," I murmured, watching Miranda shudder over her shoulder.

Barbara stepped back, grabbing my hands. "You'll come in the bathroom with me, right?"

"Of course," I answered, walking over to Stacey and taking the tests from her hands. "Emmy, why don't you order us some dinner? If it's negative, we celebrate. If it's positive, that way we have brain food to fuel us."

"Lucky One?" Emily suggested. Barbara sniffed, wiping her eyes on her shirt before nodding. I put my hand on her hip and led her into the bathroom, ignoring Stacey and Dawn saying over and over _This is just a mistake_, ignoring my boyfriend still standing by the couch. This wouldn't happen to us—couldn't happen. I would never have children, I hadn't had a period in over a year. Dawn kept telling me how lucky I was, but there was this sliver of me that wished that I could even get a scare like this. Because that would mean someday, there would be a baby. A baby that was half me.

Which meant it was part _her_. My mother.

That would be the way that she could live. And maybe me, too. If I got sick again. When I got sick again?

Yes. When.

The second I closed the door, Barbara sunk to the floor, her hands trembling like tissue in front of her mouth. "I should have gotten the Plan B pill, I should have gotten it that very second, just like you guys said. I don't know why I didn't."

"It's okay," I murmured, squatting down next to her. "You were in Bloomington, you didn't know where to go. We're going to send a stern letter to the FDA, telling them to haul ass on getting Plan B behind the counter like they promised, and we'll put in one of these negative tests right in the envelope. How 'bout that?"

Her giggle was soggy. She scraped her nose with the heel of her hand. "Randa was never this stupid. This is why I'm the dumb one, I know it is."

"You are _not_ the dumb one," I snapped. "You are the sweet, loving, kind one, Barbara Hirsch. Just because you're not a freak like me and Emmy, all library lovin', doesn't make you, not in the slightest, not at _all_ stupid. And you scored really well on your IDF test, didn't you? Sweetie, they wouldn't give you a gun if you didn't have some serious gray matter."

"Maybe they're desperate," she said, her face shading up in a grin.

"Nah. They would have said, 'Maybe you'll be more comfortable in the Swiss Army.' I think they just give those guys the little knives and send them to the German border to shake their corkscrews menacingly," I shrugged.

Barbara leaned against me, laughing. "And with a chocolate bar, too. 'Ve shall keel you wit our zuper-fine meelk chocolate!'"

"Death by Toblerone," I shuddered. "Ruthless killers, the Swiss."

She tucked her head against my collarbone and grew quiet. "If I'm pregnant…I'd have to get an abortion."

"You don't _have_ to do anything," I replied. "But if that's what you want, I'll be there."

She exhaled, a wind-like sigh. "Will Logan help me tell Nick? If I'm pregnant. I don't think I can tell him alone, and they're tight, so…"

"I know he will. He's your fake boyfriend, I think it's in that huge contract that Nicky made him sign: Will be there for crises and stuff. And when we get back out into the living room, you should go get a Logan hug. They're nice and warm," I announced. "Not bony and cold like a May hug."

"I like bony. Cold, that's not much fun. It's like hugging Angelina Jolie, but at least it's without the hepatitis I'm sure she picked up from Billy Bob Thornton," she reasoned.

"Exactly," I said, grinning into her hair. I ducked my head to look in her eye. "You ready, Babsie?"

She nodded, climbing back up to her feet and hitching her skirt around her hips. I handed her three sticks, resting them over the lip of the sink to dry once she was finished. We opened the door back up, seeing Dawn and Miranda lining up a series of plastic cups and racing through three of them with gulp-sized shots.

"Sorry, we're playing a drinking game," Miranda shrugged. "We're calling it, 'Drown Your Stress.' Wanna drink, Babs?"

Dawn poured a larger shot into another cup. "There's a bit extra, since you're drinking for two."

"Dawnie!" Stacey squawked, giving her a shove. "That was terrible! And awesome," she relented, rolling her eyes. "Anyway, Babs. When I did this the first time? I had Sunshine on the phone with me the whole time? And I nearly dropped the phone into the toilet. It's okay to be scared."

Barbara took the cup and barreled the alcohol into her mouth, wiping her lips with a shaking finger as she glanced back at the bathroom. "What about the second time?"

"We got totally baked and drove Dave insane because we kept screwing it up," Dawn giggled. "He was ready to hold the damn stick himself. And poor Lee, he just sat in the hallway the whole time, talking to May down in North Carolina? When she had that chemo down there? And when we kept ducking our heads out there, just to bug him, he'd curl around the phone like a security blanket."

Miranda glanced at me, and then stood, tugging Emily up. "Well, as much as I love stories where he gets made fun of—" Her voice broke, and she took a deep breath as the three of us went back into the bathroom. Three sticks, three of us.

Emily closed the door slightly behind us, passing a stick to me and one to Miranda. "If these are positive, our job is to keep her calm. Or—we'll let her freak, but no letting her off alone. Let her cry, let her scream, whatever she needs, but we'll worry about what to do next once she's ready."

"So, no scheduling an appointment at Planned Parenthood in the next minute," Miranda summed, and Emily nodded. "Let's go on out there. God knows how many vodka shots Dawn's had her do in the past minute."

"Your sister, honestly," Emily snorted, giving me a shove. I walked back into the large studio and glanced between the slowly drying stick and Barbara, who was sitting on the floor with her back against the couch, her body perched between my boyfriend's legs as he kneaded her shoulders. Stacey shoved her another cup, and Barbara swallowed another shot back, leaning into the pressure of Logan's thumbs on her neck. Her eyes skipped between the three of us, standing there like the stone-faced sculptures on Easter Island, but Logan's eyes found mine. They were dark with relief, but there was a line of sadness ringing them, too. This would never be us.

We would never have a baby with his blue eyes. I looked down at the stick. Blue eyes, blue line.

I held it up for Barbara to see. "Nothing, bunny girl."

"Zip," Emily beamed.

"Sorry, Dawnie, she's a solo drinker again," Miranda sighed, waving her stick in the air like a sparkler.

Barbara let out a scream and slumped to the floor, stretching her arms high above her head. "Oh, thank the holy, blessed Lord," she hollered. "That's it, I am pulling a Randa and quitting sex."

"I didn't quit sex—Alan's just a prude," Miranda snapped. "Him and Idaho or something. I think he has a potato fetish or whatever, he's a very confusing boy."

"Duh," Logan mumbled, pulling his legs in front of his body. "Um, did you want to call Nicky? I'll totally be with you, if you want."

"Yeah, let's do that. Instead of tragic Babsie phone call, this is just a funny," Barbara said, her voice gleeful and bubbling.

"Everything is just a funny," Dawn protested. "As long as you get plastered enough."

"That's so a t-shirt," Emily laughed, sitting down on the floor next to my sister.

I piled on top of Barbara and crossed my arms over her chest. "It's all done," I smiled.

"It's all done," she sighed. She winked at me. "Now on to the next crisis, huh?"

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I was lifted onto a stretcher, and it collapsed as the EMTs loaded it into the ambulance. "I'm right here," Sharon promised. "The baby-sitter is going to drive Jeff, we'll both be here."

"My baby is still okay?" I whispered.

"It's probably just a panic attack? But we just want to be on the safe side," one of the paramedics told me, squeezing my hand. "Your stepmom said you had a stressful day."

"Is Dad coming?" I asked as an oxygen mask was slipped on my face. As they told me to _breathe, breathe_.

Sharon took my hand, rubbing it between her palms. "I'm here," she repeated.

Do not cry. Do _not_ cry. The heart monitor began to race, and so many voices told me to calm down. To relax. Breathe, breathe.

Barbara's hands touched my face. "Mary Anne. You have to focus, okay? You have to stay calm."

"Why did you leave me?" I whimpered, touching her hair.

"I had to. But I'm here now," she said. "I'm right here."

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Barbara was buried in the morning, the day still cold and dewy. Her father, her sister, and her fiancé uncurled hands full of dirt on top of the sinking coffin. Mrs. Hirsch, who I had never seen before, stepped forward and brushed the dirt off of her palm, staring down at the wood surface that concealed the battered body of her daughter. Did she regret all the years she lost when she left her daughter behind?

Emily glared at the row of Barbara's stepmother and stepsisters, sitting still as her blood family stood around the grave. "They are such wastes," she hissed in my ear. "Babs and Celia were just annoyances to them. Why are they here?"

"Because not being here would make them look evil," I whispered.

"They kinda are," Emily mumbled, crossing her arms.

Miranda sighed, standing up and waving at us. "Come on, Celia's giving us the 'your turn' head bob."

Because we were her family, too. The three of us stood above our Barbara and passed a bouquet of nineteen roses the color of July-ripe strawberries, ripping the petals off and tossing them down on the casket, splattering over the chocolate wood in silence. Emily said that flowers weren't traditional at a Jewish funeral, but I didn't care. Barbara loved flowers. Barbara was deeper to me than all roses.

When the fired the guns, I fell to my knees and bent my forehead to the ground. I screamed without making a sound.

My friends and I got into a cab, each of us clutching our mementos of Barbara. I unfolded the flag and draped it over my shoulders like a cape. As if I were a superhero. As if I were as strong as her, too.

How had you died, Barbara? How did it happen?

Emily had the cabbie take us to a beach south of town, and we stepped into the air, sticky with moisture, the promise of rain. We shuffled through the sand up to the water's edge and stared back at the large cluster of hotels and high-rises up the line of the beach.

Miranda slipped off her shoes and her nylons and dipped her toes in the sea. "It's cold," she mumbled.

Emily and I stripped down, too, taking each other's hand as we scooted into the surf. "What are we going to do?" Emily whispered.

I let go of Emily's hand and kept walking forward into the water as the two of them cried. It was so cold around my knees, freezing my limbs into iron trunks, but I kept moving forward. The skirt of my dress billowed around my waist, moving as if filled with breath, sinking down as I moved deeper.

"May? Mary Anne!" I heard Miranda yell. Deeper, deeper, the water stung hard against my chest, matting the fabric of my dress like a second skin. The longer I was in the cold, the less my skin screamed up in a frozen heat.

There was something red on the horizon, rising high like a sun. Barbara. I kept walking, slogging hard against the lead of the water. Once, Stacey had stood in the water to get clean. Twice, Dawn had submerged herself to scrape off the dirty cast of Vista High from her mind. But when they reached shore, all of their problems were still there. They were not clean. They were not saved. This was not a baptism—it was the hope of drowning everything down.

Suffocate my hurt under this surf. I can't feel like this.

I closed my eyes and ducked under the surface. My hands latched onto the grainy satin of the sand at the bottom of the water, lacing my fingers in the silt as if steepling them in prayer. Bring me back to her. Where is she? Where is the red that I saw?

Hands seized the back of my dress and yanked me back up. "For shit's sake, Mary Anne Baker Spier!" Miranda shrieked. "Are you trying to kill yourself?"

My teeth began to chatter, and she dragged me back to the beach, to where Emily was kneeling, her hands pressed over her eyes. I collapsed next to her, a waterlogged heap, and she grabbed my shoulders, shaking me so hard that my eyes spun.

"What was that!" she yelled. "Huh? What were you doing?"

"I thought I saw her," I shivered. "I thought—I was trying to find her."

"What if you had, like, a seizure from how fucking cold it is out there?" Miranda spat, huddling against Emily for warmth. "How would I explain that to your family? To Logan? 'May went for a swim in _December_.' Girl, it was snowing here last week, okay? You could have died! And we better hustle, get us inside somewhere before we freeze to death."

"I just want her," I breathed, and Miranda's face slumped, her cold body meeting mine.

"I do, too, but May, you can't be with her," Miranda whispered.

Emily rested her head on my back. I wondered if she could hear my sad, sick heart slowing in misery. "You cannot be with Barbara, sweetheart. She's gone. You have to stay with us."

I looked back up at Tel Aviv. The White City, they called it. Because of the buildings, Emily explained, a period of architecture. But I stared at it until it fuzzed over in light. A white city, like clouds. A city for somewhere deep in the sky. All of the buildings turned to rust, dusting over in red, ruined and real and not where my Barbara would be. The white city that I could not see. That I could not follow her to.

My body slumped onto the frozen sand, and I balled up in a curl of icing skin and did not cry. The sea held all of my water for me now.

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"Mary Anne?" Sharon said. "Mary Anne, please, just relax, honey, please. You're going to make yourself sick, please, honey, calm down."

"Stay with me," Barbara pleaded, her pale face mooning above me. I closed my eyes. "Stay with me."

I opened my eyes, my hand in hers. I looked out over a large, warm sea, the color of my husband's eyes. My baby's eyes? I nicked my fingers over the stones on my necklace and glanced to my right.

"Babsie," I murmured, squeezing her hand. "I'm staying with you."

Her hair tumbled in the breeze, and I could see the shapes of three people lying out on the sand not far from us. The air was misting with the evaporated salt from the water, sinking with humidity and the whip of the wind.

Barbara licked her lips and looked out over the sea. "Oh, Maybelle," she sighed. "I didn't mean for you to—May. That wasn't me. I mean, I was there, I was there from the moment you went to your house. But that wasn't me—I can't touch you, sweetie. I can't touch you or talk to you. I didn't want you to follow me—I want you to live," she pressed.

"Who was that then?" I blinked.

Her face ghosted in a smile. "Didn't you once say that magic and mystery were the jalapeño peppers of the universe?" My breath charged up my throat in a lava, and she twisted a curl of my hair around her finger. "I sent you someone who could save you. I sent you Ry." Barbara held me closer as she added, "And a redhead named Mallory Pike."


	28. Chapter 25: Logan

Thank all y'all for your kindness with my brother—the surgery was a total success. His recovery is going to be a very long road, but as he declared, "I have OxyContin, and the hospital has DirecTV. We're good." You guys are amazing—thank you for all of your sweet thoughts.

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For two hours, Lewis and I sat together at the edge of the fence, staring down at the quarry lake. I read all four of Mary Anne's books—he flipped through the same two sports magazines, but he never left my side. Behind us, I could hear people. Too many people than the house should hold.

They were coming because of me.

When people die, mourners bring food to their house. I had always wondered why—when I was young, the idea of death made my stomach knot so tight, I couldn't even stand the smell of food. That scent competed against the crush of fear in my belly, and I would feel so sick, I had to rush out of the house where the wake was being held.

But then my cousin Loretta died in Afghanistan. And Leah and Little Lloyd died in Iraq. We went home to Louisville, to the houses stuffed with food. When Loretta was killed, I was still just a freshman at my boarding school, and I arrived at the house in my khakis and polo shirt. My uniform. And Lewis came home in his, so close to what a Marine would wear, a Marine like her. I felt so stupid, so silly. So I ate until my body was pounded with food, just stupid with food. As stupid as I was in my own head.

When Lewis led me back into the house from our perch next to the fence, I could smell it all from yards away—the hot steam of chicken and cookies and vegetables and chocolate, all of them smashing together. I could tell Lewis was hungry—he was swallowing hard and stepping quicker, but I stopped in front of the patio doors and stared in at the kitchen table, swollen with platters of food.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing at it all from outside.

My Aunt Gina snapped a white dishtowel in the air and settled it over a loaf of bread. "Word spread about Mary Anne. Folks wanted to be kind," she explained, rolling her hand to urge me inside.

"Would you like something? Mrs. Peete made her chicken divan—remember? With the sour cream? You used to eat that stuff up so quick at potlucks," Aunt Cathy prompted, moving out of the living room. Was the whole family here? What was this, a rally? So, I could expect the Lexington, the Bowling Green, the Indianapolis, the Bellevue members of my family to descend next—come on, gather the kids, we got ourselves a crisis. Mobilizing? Or were they coming here to wait. For the next phone call.

I kept staring down at that table. Food. All of this food. "For Mary Anne," I mumbled.

"Well—people make food in a time like this," Mom said, wiping her hands on her jeans. She tipped her face up to stare at me—she was looking at me like she would when my father was starting to get angry. That careful look—not judging, just watching. Waiting to see where this would go.

"People make food when someone's dead," I spat, grabbing a hotcake out of a Bob Evans take out box. Right: fresh biscuits would fix everything. "She's not dead."

There was too much quiet after that. My cousins, my aunts, all of their chatter. The low wave of male voices—my uncles and dad—from the study. I said that so loud, and now they were all silent.

I waited.

_Of course she isn't. She'll be just fine. This is just a little bump. Chin up, Mary Anne's gonna make it. Now, let's have some Graeters' until you have to leave for the airport to catch that plane back to her, huh?_

I waited. So quiet, so quiet, everything was screaming in quiet.

I grabbed the casserole of chicken divan and threw it down on the floor. The ceramic shattered on Aunt Cathy's clean wood floor, each piece sagging away from each other and letting the yellow cheese and white cream ooze all over. Some pieces of broccoli and chicken had spattered on the wall, some had spun out into the living room.

Look at what your anger has done, Logan. Now everyone was staring at me—I hated when people stared at me, and they all were, and they were all looking at me like I was _him_. They hadn't seen me as Dad in years, in six years, and now here I was, Logan the Lyman again.

"She's not dead," I yelled. "Stop acting like she is!" I spun back around and raced out the back door, then hopped the fence over into the Keaton's yard—our yard now, I supposed—and kept leaping the fences like I was nine again, racing against the rest of my cousins to get down to the lake first. No wonder I did so well in eighth grade track in the hundred hurdles—this was still in me, the race. Because when you won, you were good. When you were first, you were right.

At the front gate of the quarry pool, Cassie Banks was stretched out in the guard booth, her legs dangling out to catch the last bits of evening sun. As she buzzed me through the gates, she stared at me. She knew. Everyone knew. What, did my cousins go through the whole city with a loudspeaker?

I jogged through the tongue of grass that lined the 50-meter lanes until a lifeguard yelled at me to walk. All of their stupid rules. No this, no that, only one bounce on the diving board, no footballs, no basketballs—and our personal favorite, no excessive personal displays of affection. Just this afternoon, I hugged Kerry from behind as we stood on the wooden raft in the middle of the deep part of the lake, and she screamed out, _Help! Help! Excessive personal display of affection!_

Then Jeff called the first time.

Then he called again.

I headed back to the deep part, around where the fountain spat up jets of water while two women on plastic rafts paddled hard with their hands to avoid the spray. Mary Anne said that when Stacey first told Dawn about the rape, the two girls were in the ocean. That Stacey felt clean. The water, where Dawn went when she ran away. Where Stacey took Dawn after that horrible melt down following Sunny's visitation.

A dead girl.

I tugged my wallet out of my pants pocket, then slid my watch off of my wrist and set it on top of the leather billfold. I yanked my belt back off my waist—it wasn't special, but Mary Anne had written on its inside, a quotation I loved from Al McGuire. Like the Sisterhood Belt she and her girls shared, she wanted me to have something strong to hold me up, too.

_Life is what you allow yourself not to see._

I backed up three steps, my jeans swishing against my legs, and then charged forward and leapt into the water, plunging the ten feet down and holding hard to the stones that lined the bottom. Back up through the green glass ceiling of the water's surface, I stared until I could see Mary Anne's face to tell me when to come back.

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The first time Jeff called, my brother, sister, and I were walking up the street with towels wrapped around our bathing-suited bodies, striding around in that unashamed way that just screams, _We're having fun. So what if we're barefoot in the city. We have no fear of hepatitis!_ Hunter and I kept whirling our shirts around our heads and whipping them at each other's backs while Kerry scampered away, her ponytail all ratty with water.

As we reached the Keaton house, our almost-house, Kerry pointed up at the second floor. "So, Dad said that if I go to U of L, I could have that one," she bragged.

"If you go to U of L, Lo, Bob and Dad said that dey'd gibe you and Bary Add the whole basement—it could be like an apardmend," Hunter prodded. And then he sneezed, right into the shirt. Okay, ew?

We were _not_ moving here. Much love to the Lou, but their psych program wasn't good enough for Mary Anne. Call me a total elitist, but I loved the idea of Mary Anne maybe going to Harvard or Yale—my wife, totally Janine Kishi-ing all over your ass. Which made Mary Anne all upset, got her protesting that she wasn't some brilliant mind, but just a hard worker.

Seriously, the girl has a photographic memory. The fact that she never made a mistake in the BSC record book should have been a hint. Once she learns something or sees something, it stays in there. She just needs to be reminded sometimes because there's too much littering her brain. And she always is checking her notes, her day planner, her journal, because far be it from Mary Anne to just trust herself—no, no, she has to _know_. She has to be sure. But if you shoved a knife against her belly and ordered her to tell you, oh, all of the dates from my games this past year, how many minutes I played and all of my stats, she'd be able to rattle them all off, _plus_ whatever homework she had been doing that night.

_January 25: 28 minutes. 4-for-10, 11 points, 12 assists, 3 rebounds. And one turnover, slick_, she'd probably add. _And I worked on an essay for my argumentation class on the collapse of the rhetorical triangle in comedic rhetoric._

She knew all the answers. Except how to let down my brother and sister on this issue. I struggled to answer him, but my phone rang. Thank God. I crossed my fingers and hoped for it to be Mary Anne. Or Davis—he was due to call me any day now. I had sent him a phone card, but I could never be sure when he was around, like, technology. Some people volunteer at playrooms in a hospital. Other people go off to Darfur and build churches.

Show off.

But it was Jeff. Kerry peeked over my shoulder and gave me a suspicious look. "What does _he_ want? I though he said he would call when recruitment started next week. It's not next week."

"Thank you, Sherlock," I smarmed, putting my hand on her face and pushing back. I knew what this was about: things with Richard didn't go well. I could feel it. I sighed. If Jeff was calling, Mary Anne was probably in tears. I hit the talk button. "Hey, Jeff, what's up?"

"Wally!" Mariah chirped.

Oh, shit.

"Ry," I replied. "Why are you on Jeff's phone?"

"Because he's yelling at the EMTs that Mary Anne is allergic to aspirin. That mistake's not ever gonna happen again, is it?" she remarked.

I gripped Hunter's shoulder and tried not to buckle down to the ground. "EMTs?"

"Oh, your wife and her daddy got into a big ol' fight, and snaps to Mary Anne, _yall_, she actually gave it back this time. But she had a panic attack—and hey, here's your daily dose of irony. Guess whose front lawn she fainted on?" Ry asked.

"Whose?" I whispered.

"Aw, the Rowdowskys'! Isn't that where you and her had your big ol' first date? She fell into your arms, your little love at first sight from SMS was totally confirmed, blah blah fucking blah," she snorted. "And now they're prying her off of that grass, and the Rowdowskys' current baby-sitter is getting her poor red hair mauled by Ms. Maybelle as your wife calls her _Barbara_ over and over again."

My teeth began to shake. Barbara. What did that mean? She was hallucinating? "Ry—is she okay?"

"I guess so—I had a dream that ol' I See Dead People collapsed in a heap, and the baby-sitter was playing in the back yard, so she didn't see the big fainting. So, I swung by the Rowdowskys', told the baby-sitter to look out the front window from about six-fifteen on. The girl follows instructions well—what a responsible, experienced baby-sitter," Mariah cooed.

"I thought you said that you didn't interfere with dreams that you see," I snapped. Kerry had her hands on my back, rubbing the steel that was creeping into my shoulders. Why did Mariah always talk in riddles? Why was she always so damn creepy?

And why was she still calling me Wally! He retired last month. Lord, get a hobby, Mariah. Other than voodoo and witchcraft.

"Well," she huffed. "The night I had this dream, I woke up and my windows were open—and dorm windows don't slide up that easy, right? So, open windows, and the whole damn room smelled like a fucking fruit salad. All I needed was for my stereo to snap on and start blaring out 'Hail, Britannia' for me to get the hint, okay? The ghosts were restless, and I don't really like to play with that, so who was I to ignore it? I made sure I got home from Iceland in time. But. I have to pack up and get to New York tonight—I'm doing Summer Session II in Luxemburg at Miami's campus there," she added.

Well, what do I say now? Thank you?

"You're welcome," Mariah trilled. "I'm outtie. Oh, and Wally? Work on your cross defense. Weaker than tissue in the NCAAs—they replayed the Northern Iowa game on ESPN Classic? You boys got luckier than fuck, and I hope you learned a big ass lesson."

Yes, Mommy. "I did well in that game," I protested.

"Wanna talk about UCLA again?" she taunted. Um, no. "Talk to you soon, Wally. Keep America safe for me."

There was a shuffling on her side of the phone. I covered the mouthpiece and hissed to Kerry and Hunter, "Let's go—Mary Anne's sick, I might need to fly to her, okay?"

"Run," Kerry declared, shoving me forward. As our feet hit the walkway up to Uncle Leo and Aunt Cathy's, I heard Jeff calling out hello.

"Jeff—should I get on the next plane or what?" I pressed, following Hunter into the house. My brother shoved my cousin Maria off the computer, and as I plopped into an armchair next to the desk, he pulled up a few travel search engines, his fingers ready and curled over the keys.

"Okay, first, that witch girl is weird. She showed up two minutes ago and totally stole my phone? And now she's driving off in a car just littered in 'Republicans for Voldemort' stickers? Cracked, yo." He let out a large breath. "They say it's just an anxiety attack, but they're loading her into the ambulance. Mallory Pike was sitting for the Rowdowskys', but Jackie just got home, so she's gonna drive me to the hospital. Don't worry, Logan, I'll take good care of her. Me and Sharon."

I chewed on my lip. "You think she'll be okay to come home tomorrow?"

"If she isn't, I'll call," he promised. He grew quiet for a moment. "Here, the EMT wants to talk to you."

Kerry touched my knee. "She okay?"

"A panic attack," I whispered. What did Richard do to her? I was going to kill him, then bring him back to life and murder him again. But an EMT was on the phone before I could really contemplate how I was going to pan-sear and dice that son of a bitch.

When was Mary Anne's miscarriage. "Two weeks ago tomorrow—she's been bleeding ever since—but her doctor said that was normal? That sometimes it takes a few weeks?" And this is important why?

What was Mary Anne's usual blood pressure. "139 over 42."

There was a pause. "Really," the paramedic said.

"Yeah—she's at risk for preeclampsia," I replied. "Why?"

"She's hypotensive with tachypnea," the paramedic explained.

Speak English! Medical people—y'all suck, honestly. Do they teach How to Talk Like an Ass at the hospital? "What is that?"

"Low blood pressure and her breathing is extremely rapid. Abnormally fast breathing is part of a panic attack…but the blood pressure is odd. Don't worry, she's on her way to the hospital, her stepmother is riding alone," she assured me. "The doctor will call you once your wife is set."

My wife. Under all of this, under all of this insanity, there was that little thing to hold in the soft pockets of my palm, my heart—she was my wife. I was that lucky to have her. I put my left hand over my chest and sighed. "Thank you," I said.

Save her, I meant.

The front door opened, and Lewis walked in, his thumbs sliding over the keys of his phone. God, did he _ever_ stop texting his girlfriend? His eyes edged over to us, and I could see Hunter and Kerry silently working their jaws. The glow on his face dimmed, and he came up to me and squatted on the ground, tapping my knee with his fist. _Do you need to go?_ he asked.

I asked that of Jeff right away: "Come on, man, I should be there," I pushed. Shit, I almost whined. "I'm gonna get a flight."

"Yeah, and when Mary Anne gets checked out in an hour? You'll have blown a couple hundred bucks. This is no biggie, Logan. She'd hate for you to hover, right? Just be chill. When she's zen, I'll have her call, okay?

That's right. Don't hover, don't smother. Be the Logan that Mary Anne loves—the one that trusts her. I mean, how dumb would it be for me to go all the way to Connecticut tonight when she had a flight home tomorrow? Very dumb. Dumber than a land war in Asia dumb.

"Okay. But call me the second you know what's going on," I relented. When I hung up, I snarled up the side of my mouth at Lewis and sighed as we went into the living room where the rest of my cousins were. "I'm gonna wait until they know more—probably just a panic attack, though, so I guess it's no biggie."

"It's cool—we'll have ourselves a good night, take your mind off of it. We'll put in _Master and Commander 2_, we'll play Apples to Apples, we'll just, you know, hang," Lewis told me, slapping me on the back.

"I'll make fondue—we can have fights to the death with our little spears—_en_ _garde_, Lew, you loser!" Evvie giggled, crouching low and swinging an imaginary sword on her way into the kitchen.

Within minutes, my cousins Maria and Hannah were screaming around the house with Kerry and Hunter, everything was so full of noise—and Dad was at work. Extra bonus. Everything was good, right? Everything was great.

I had slumped into the easy chair by the DVD rack with a change of clothes in my lap, running my finger over the films. . "Okay, well—" I shrugged. "As long as you make the curry thingie sauce, too, I'm totally in for tonight." I could smell the Bruno barbeque sauce heating up on the stove and grinned back at Evvie and Lewis, the two of them moving around the kitchen. A sick wife meant me getting barbeque without having to make it myself? I could deal.

By the time Jeff called again, we had settled around the television with two pots of oil and one of cheese bubbling on the coffee table. On Tuesday, we had stayed up all night watching the six Harry Potter films, and last night had been sports movies—tonight, there was a desire for bloodlust. Or just lust, as I watched Kerry and Maria sigh over the cover of the DVD, tracing the face of the actor gazing—I don't know, purposefully? Whatever, _however_, he was gazing, the girls were going insane over him. I didn't have a "gaze" like that—without my glasses, I was pretty sure my only look was "annoyed squinting." Not too sexy.

"See, if all boat captains looked like Russell Crowe? I'd join the Navy," Evvie sighed.

"If all doctors looked like Paul Bettany, I'd get injured more often," Maria giggled, snapping a pretzel in two.

I rolled my eyes at Lewis. "Okay, does Christina, like, fawn over guys and then justify it with some shit about how you look like them? 'Cause Mary Anne is always pulling that crap. She puts in _Wimbledon_ starring Mr. Hot Doctor—"

"I think that would be Dr. Hot Doctor," Kerry corrected with a smirk.

Tossing a piece of raw chicken at her head, I continued, "Anyway. She puts in that movie, practically loses a liter of saliva drooling over Paul Bettany, and then when I call her on her pathetic lusting? She goes, 'Oh, but he _looks_ like _you_.' As if I look like some skinny ass Brit."

"You do look like him. Except he's hot," Evvie grinned, adjusting the Sterno can under the fondue pot.

I grabbed her around the neck and ground my knuckles into her mound of pale brown hair as Lewis laughed. "Dude, Christina does that to me with—the dude who can't act with the sleepy eyes from _Scooby Doo_."

"Freddie Prinze, Jr. So sexy," Maria supplied as Lewis smirked at me, popping the collar of his polo shirt. "If he never talked, I'd be so on him."

"All guys are like that," Kerry grumbled. "They talk, they ruin it."

I caught her eye, but she quickly ducked her head down as Evvie announced, "Well, _my_ boyfriend looks exactly like a young Tom Cruise, and everybody says so."

My breath snagged in my throat, and I let out a low whistle. "Oh, Evs, that's not a good thing—Tom is seven kinds of batshit. My friend Babs had this theory—"

And my phone rang again.

I pushed back from the coffee table, ignoring my cousins as I walked back to the kitchen. Why did I mention Barbara like that? Like she was still here, with us, spouting her insane ideas that Renee Zelwegger was a zombie or Tom Cruise was the epicenter of the world's evil and ate puppies to retain his youthful vigor. Crazy stuff that sent Mary Anne into hysterics while Barbara shook her celebrity magazines and begged for my girlfriend to take her seriously.

I used to joke to Barbara that she should see if the Israeli Army had a Pop Culture Panzer division. That's when I would get smacked on the head with her copy of _Star_, and Mary Anne would kiss my scalp with her giggling mouth. And her fingers would brush against the inside of my wrist before lacing with my own, clutching me tight under the tabletop or on top of her leg. It's one of the things I loved best about her—when I was Miranda's boyfriend, I was kept on the outside. I was like an accessory, meant to compliment. To enhance. But Mary Anne made her friends my friends.

And they wanted to _be_ my friend. Well, not Miranda. We broke up so badly, with so much anger and annoyance and absolutely no love for each other—that had been lost long before the official end—that the only thing that kept us orbiting around each other was how much we both loved Mary Anne. But Emily and I had already begun bonding over basketball. It was Barbara I barely knew.

But by midway through our senior year, I was pretty tight with Barbara. Well, she and Mary Anne were glued to each other, though Barbara insisted that it was Mary Anne and _me_ who were inseperable. Maybe the truth was somewhere in the middle—the middle of a triangle. Which was actually an invisible square, her boyfriend our unseen forth corner.

Mary Anne was calling Mallory Pike _Barbara_. What did that mean?

Last Saturday, Barbara would have turned twenty-one, the first out of all of us. Instead, she is dead, in the ground somewhere in Tel Aviv. Mary Anne, Miranda, and Emily have created a ritual for both her birthday and for her death day, her _Yahrzeit_. Mary Anne had laid in bed and wrote down a dozen memories of Barbara, crossing some out because they were too sad, others were too private to share in front of Erin and Jeremy, some were so silly, she didn't think they were important enough to share on a special day. Maybe a memory that she and I would share together, a little thing over dinner or folding laundry.

The morning that she left for the beach, Mary Anne had radiation. Miranda and Emily were in a massive state of hangover, so I volunteered to take her instead. We sat in the waiting room, sitting with me on her left, working on a crossword puzzle in the paper.

"Oh, shut up—fourteen down? 'What Kansas calls limestone/' Could that be 'rock chalk?'" I laughed, tapping the paper.

"It's so your day," Mary Anne smiled, filling in the squares with her pen.

What's the harm in a little dirty flirting before nine in the morning? "So, I'm getting some now?" I teased, snaking my hand over her thigh.

"I would like to remind you that you're the one who said, Not in my friends' living room," Mary Anne stated. "I was so willing, angel, but you and your morals."

"I need to get rid of those," I grumbled, my fingers pressing deeper. How much longer until we would have the house to ourselves? Honestly.

She tossed the paper aside and curled up in a ball, urging my hand to loop under her thigh and rest in the bend of her knee. As if she were a ball that I could pick up and hold close to my chest. I could, though. Her legs couldn't get as tight to her body as usual though, with the inflating stomach in the way. Our baby.

Christ on the flippin' cross, stop _thinking_ like that. Not until we're certain we can keep it. That it won't make her sicker. We had to talk to Sean and Flynn, make sure this was all worth it. It has to be, though. It could save her. It will, it will. This baby is a cure.

If only the other one had made it until the tests. If only.

"I picked my Babsie memory—the one from the night she got engaged, and we had the big catfight—you took one look and walked right back out of the apartment and ate your muffin in peace," she remembered, resting her head on my arm.

"It was an above average muffin," I nodded. "You guys were so full of feathers, it was ridiculous."

"What's your favorite memory, Logan? Right at this minute," she asked.

Almost too easy.

It wasn't the most fun I had ever had with Barbara, or the best night—it was barely longer than a few minutes, but it would always be my favorite.

Mary Anne usually never came to a game of mine—for home games, she would come for pregame and halftime, slipping outside with Miranda where Mary Anne would read a book and Miranda would smoke a pack of cigarettes between the poms dance numbers. Before every game, though, she wrote me a letter saying how much she loved me, how much she believed in me; I would fold them up and slip them under the insole of my left shoe, and I wouldn't even notice that she wasn't in the stands.

But our second round of States, we had an away game, just over in Mercer versus my sister's school and the best and brightest of SMS's old squad now at St. Mark's. And Mary Anne promised she'd be there.

"Right behind the poms girls—I'll even paint my face if you want me to—big ol' green 'S' on my cheeks," she declared, tracing the shape on her face.

"That's okay. I'm really, really happy you're coming. I was going to ask you, but…the fact you…yeah," I mumbled, leaning down and giving her a hug. Her skin felt too hot against my hands.

"Would you have made a big deal if you had asked? Stargazer lilies and brand new hardcover books? Down on one knee?" she teased, hooking her fingers over my shoulders.

"You are so turned on by the smell of a new book," I laughed. "Honestly, you sure you don't want to be a librarian? Or would that be too tempting for you?"

She squealed, giving me a hard push with her too-hot hands before grabbing her bag to run off to first period. "Behind the poms girls—I'll be the one who's reading a big ol' book," she purred, her eyes sloed and sweet. What a tease. I grinned at her and started down the other hall before spinning around. "Hey, Mary Anne?" I called over the other students milling in the halls.

She turned back to me and squeezed through people. Her face was too pink, but white around her mouth and eyes. The odd raccoon mask of an infection, my mom would say. I put my hand on her forehead—burning up, of course.

"It's just a little fever," she blurted out. "People get sick all the time and just push through it."

"Mary Anne Spier—" I began.

"If you're going to bitch me out, you could at least Baker me, too," she said with a weak grin.

Rolling my head back, I moaned, "_Tesorina_, a cold for you can way too quickly turn into a huge deal. You're still really fragile physically, okay? When you're sick, you have to take it way easy."

She sighed, scuffing her toe against the tile. "You think I should go home?"

"Yes," I ordered, staring her down until she nodded. "Right now, you are two kinds of hot? And we only like you to be one kind. Besides," I added, rubbing a thumb against her pinking jaw. "You need to be healthy to be my big cheerleader tomorrow night."

"Go, fight, win, et cetera," Mary Anne said with a roll of her hand. "Come over after practice, okay?"

"Yes'm," I said, and her lips hit my cheek.

By the time I got there, her fever had hit a hundred and two, and Dawn was rubbing ice cubes on her wrists. "Mom thinks she has strep," Dawn sighed, and Mary Anne looked at me and began to cry.

"I'm not going to be there for you," she wailed, clutching the front of my sweatshirt.

"It's okay," I assured her, kissing the burning skin of her temples, her peppered mouth. "You love me, you believe in me, that's enough."

"It's not," she sniffed. "I want to do more."

I kissed her again. "I swear, Mary Anne, you're just fine. Just get better so you can buy me dinner this weekend—Washington Mall's just got a Chipotle? And I'm thinking losing point guards love barbacoa fajitas," I hinted. She smiled, resting her head on my shoulder, but I could tell: she wasn't happy.

She was thinking. No. Plotting.

The next day, I showed up at school for morning practice and tried to tune out the dire predictions of SHS's imminent demise. Though Emily did corner me the moment I got to my school locker and said that the betting pool had me at scoring at least thirty points.

"See? Even though we'll lose, we have faith in you," she chirped, slapping my arm. "And Lee? I put twenty on you banking eight treys, so don't let me down."

"Just for you, Emmy," I rolled my eyes. She took in a sharp snort of breath, but then she bent around me and began to laugh.

She rubbed my arm and pointed in front of her. "Your girlfriend loves you," she giggled, "but she's a crazy one, all right. Which is why I love _her_."

I spun around and saw Barbara bouncing down the hall in jeans and a Regina Spektor t-shirt, her bright red hair instead dyed Mary Anne's near black and pinned in a way that made it look an inch long—a hairdo so clever, it had to be the masterwork of one Stacey McGill, I grinned.

"Mary Anne, I presume?" I asked as Barbara skipped to a stop in front of me.

She thrust a bouquet of stargazer lilies at me, ten of them, the number on my jersey, bound up with a red ribbon. Red like a fever, red like her heart. "Actually? Since I am substitute Mary Anne, and you never call her May? That's what you can call me," Barbara ordered. "Here are the rules, similar to when you and me are having Nicky dates. No touching of the bathing suit areas, no tongue, and no special cuddling."

"Never," I agreed. No worries on that. Barbara was like my sister—uh, ew. "So, um, _May_, what do you have planned?"

Barbara bent over into her purse and handed me a hardcover of _East of Eden_ and then tugged out Mary Anne's glasses, copper frames in the shape of cat's eyes. She placed them on her face and gave me a curt nod. I forced myself not to laugh. "I thought we could discuss books and other academic things suitable for smart people." She linked her arm with mine and frowned. "What do you and May talk about?"

"Whatever interests us," I shrugged. "We talk about most everything."

"Does that include Nicole Kidman? She's so creepy," Barbara whined.

"Well, May, you've never wanted to talk about her before," I noted, leading us to the juice machines in the cafeteria. "But if you want to, I suppose we can."

"Oh, thank God," Barbara breathed. "I mean, you two play Scrabble for fun—that's my idea of punishment. But we can so talk about school, Middle East politics, and Hollywood stuff."

"I like options one and two," I told her as Miranda came running into the cafeteria with Emily behind her, Stacey and Dawn skidding in a moment later. The four of them gaped at Barbara.

"What!" Barbara squealed. She slapped her forehead and put her bookbag on the ground. "Oh, duh, of course." She pulled out the huge psychology diagnostics manual, the _DSM-IV_, and a small stuffed beagle. Oh, dear _God_. "It's not yellow, but it looks like J.D., right?"

Dawn and Miranda slumped to the floor in laughter as Stacey pulled out her digital camera and snapped photos of Barbara preening. Emily pulled out her reporter's notebook and called out, "Dude, I am so putting twenty bucks on you two breaking up by lunchtime."

"We're meant to be, you bitch!" Barbara yelped, seizing my arm.

I slapped a hand against my forehead and then tugged a ten out of my wallet. I learned forward and gave it to Emily. "I'd make it third period," I told her, and Barbara slapped the back of my head.

"That's it," _May_ warned. "I'm withholding."

"Oh, what a loss," I gasped.

Barbara wiggled her eyebrows and waved the manual. "Ah, ah, Lee. I'm withholding a letter from your lover. You be a good boyfriend, you hear?"

"Yes, May," I saluted, picking up the flowers and the book and taking her arm as the other girls continued to scream in hysterics, clutching at each other. All day, the whole school giggled at the sight of Barbara, the only poms girl not in her uniform with her odd-colored hair—a wash out, she swore—bouncing around at my side with her May props all day long.

And I was laughing with them, cracking up each time Barbara scooted Mary Anne's glasses up her nose or used some word that not even my girlfriend would know. _Gosh, Lee, I think that the often times spurious claims of _StarMagazine _are the funniest things in the world_. Mary Anne was text-messaging Barbara all day with things to say, little stories that would keep me happy, that kind of face-cracking smile happy.

We were going to lose against St. Mark's, we were going to be humiliated…but it didn't matter. Between Mary Anne and _May_, I was having a good day. It was such a good day.

But that's not my favorite memory, of Barbara bobbing about as my girlfriend from first bell to last bell. It was at the game, after the game, after the loss. My father sat with my sister on the home side—the St. Mark's side, and it hurt me like a hammer on the bones of my chest. I fouled out, I failed, and I crouched low in front of the bench and tried to figure out how to deal with this. Dad was going to kill me for being such an embarrassment. The team was going to be so disappointed, and I was going to have to say something to buck them up for next year, when things would be even _worse_.

I could see Stacey out of the corner of my eye with Dawn, Emily interviewing Coach Patrick. Miranda was probably waiting outside for her, an impatient cigarette burning in her fingers.

And then a hand touched my shoulder. "Okay, I've got him. What should I do?" Barbara said into her cell phone, urging me up to my feet. I watched her listen to Mary Anne, and then Barbara handed me the phone.

"You want Barbara to get you to someplace private or not?" my girlfriend asked, her voice croaky and tight.

"I won't cry, don't worry," I mumbled.

"Tell Barbara that I'm ready," Mary Anne said. I told Barbara, and she grabbed my waist, holding me tight and rubbing my back as Mary Anne told me, "I love you, I love you more than any words I got, Logan. And I'm going to tell you right now why you're incredible."

And when she said the number one, Barbara wrote it into my back. Just like Mary Anne does—writing things into my skin because they are important enough to be felt and not just heard. I leaned into my girlfriend's best friend as Mary Anne told me her favorite ten reasons, and Barbara kept scrawling into my skin.

Mary Anne's voice began to crackle, and she managed to tell me goodbye before her throat bottomed out. And I was left with Barbara, her brown hair making her face look smaller, her eyes bigger. I kissed the top of her head. "You were a wonderful girlfriend," I told her.

"You think I can put that on my resume?" she chirped. "Right under my summer scooping ice cream at Cold Stone."

"Oh my God, I love that place. You have just risen five points in my book. Gives you a total of five. Plus the original one million," I grinned.

"Well, I'm giving you a brand new total of eleventy-eight," Barbara announced. "It puts you in fifth, behind Nicky and my girls. But an honorable finish." She squeezed my arm and glanced at the court. "This is an honorable finish, Lee."

And for the first time, that nickname didn't sting. It almost felt right.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jeff's second phone call said that Mary Anne didn't have a panic attack.

"Can I talk to Kerry?" he blurted out.

"No, you can _not_," I snapped. Not the time to try to get back in her pants, you dick, come _on_. "What's wrong with Mary Anne?"

His breath was so weird, so strained. "Let me talk to your sister, Jesus, please! Come on, Logan, I'm your brother, just trust me."

Oh, for Christ's sake. I strode back to the living room as Evvie hit the pause button, and I handed the phone to Kerry. She lifted up to her feet, her mouth open but silent. She turned her back to me, a hand snaking across her chest and clutching hard to her opposite side. After a minute, she nodded and rotated around to face me. She looked at Lewis on the couch, and he sprung up, letting Kerry and me sit instead.

Kerry put the phone on the table and took both of my hands in hers. My face pulled back, that weird spasm that comes right before you know you're about to get hit. Or when you are going to cry, a hard cry that just turns everything inside of you and dumps it on the concrete. It's funny how the two of them feel the same.

I tried to pull my hands back, to cover my face, but Kerry held hard. "Loey, in the ambulance, Mary Anne's blood pressure just plummeted, and when she got to the hospital, she had a heart attack. They think they know what's wrong, that she got some amniotic fluid in her bloodstream, and she had an embolism—her body treats it almost like an allergic reaction, like Hunter and peanuts, and they're working really hard right now, but they can't promise anything."

My mouth slumped—when did my tongue get so heavy? I dipped low on my bones and slumped back, but Kerry towed me back in. Her eyes were the same color as mine, but they seemed almost green at the edges. I had never noticed that before. How could I know her for seventeen years and not see that?

Wait a sec.

Sitting down with Mary Anne at our dining room table. "Pretty girl? I have something to tell you. I've…always had this dream. Of being one of those masked wrestlers from Telemundo? And this summer, I'm going to follow my dream. You can support it or not, but it's what I need to do."

Running up to her at Qdoba and grabbing her around the waist, panting, "Mary Anne, you have to hide me. We stole the Demon Deacon mascot from Wake Forest, that big ass head thingie, and the cops have been chasing us down I-40 the whole way. I think we lost them somewhere in Durham, but, Tess, please, I need your help."

Kissing her and then sighing, "Mary Anne, it's probably time to tell you. That whole Oak Hill thing? It was a lie. I was actually in juvie—that's how I learned how to play ball so well, there in lock up. You know that temper of mine back then, well, one day, I got so mad? That I pounded the hell out of some guy, just because I could."

And she would blink at me, her face going smooth and slack. And then blink again.

Until my eyes crinkled at the corners, until my mouth began to shake in a grin, and she would switch over into a massive scowl and give me a hard shove or a punch and yelp, "Logan Giuseppe, I swear to _God_, one day, I am going to get you so good? It's gonna make your heart stop. You are such an ass!"

But she would kiss me. And I would forget: Mary Anne might be plotting.

"Bullshit," I said, my back snapping back up like a piece of elastic. "I call bullshit. That's why you turned around, because you were trying not to laugh. Honestly, Kay, you and Mary Anne both suck so freakin' much, and I will get you back? So you better sleep with one eye open tonight, _Alladola_." I grabbed the phone and smirked, "All right, Jeff, tell Mary Anne nice try, but she is rumbling with the master."

There was only silence. Oh, man up, Jeff. I glared at Kerry, those eyes of hers just staring back. She hated losing as much as me—look at her, all sad. Admit it, you're busted, Kerry. A rustling filled the phone, and I could hear someone breathing on the other end. "Mary Anne," I prompted with a slight smirk. "It's okay to be totally embarrassed that you got schooled. It happens to the best of us. Well, not me, I rock, but—"

"Logan," Sharon said. No, she whispered. It was so low and quiet and sad. "It's not a joke. Mary Anne is very sick, you need to get here."

It was so quiet, I could hear all of the clocks in the house ticking in concert. I gave myself seven seconds to think of how to speak again. "How did this happen?" I asked.

"They don't know, sweetheart, but that's not the important thing right now. What's important is they work on fixing it. Now—you need to get here," she repeated. "Fly, don't drive. If you can get to New York, Jeff or Mallory will meet you. Okay?"

"Okay," I replied. That's all: okay. This is what I should have said: Thank you for being there. Are you doing all right?

Is Richard there?

I snapped the phone shut and handed it back to Kerry. She took my hands again. I'm the one who comforts _her_. Like I did on Monday, this isn't right. It's not right. "This isn't right," I told her, switching my eyes all around. Table to TV to her to hands to table to kitchen to Hunter to her.

Kerry ran her fingers over my knuckles and squeezed tight. "I'm going to get you a ticket to New York."

"What happened?" Hunter asked. And everyone was staring not at her but at me. I waited for Kerry to clear her throat before I stood up. I had to get out of here, I did. I went out the patio doors and went straight to the edge of the yard. I sat down on the grass and scooted as close as I could to the green plastic-coated weave of the chain-link fence. It was only a few inches from the lip of the quarry bluff, and you could almost look straight down; it used to make me dizzy, to be three stories high like this, and so close to the edge.

Out across the pool were the fifty-meter lanes; twice a day, they pulsed for hours with the swim club kids, just grinding out meter after meter without end. Ever since I was small, I liked watching these kids, how hard they worked. At five in the morning, you could see a few of them arrive, stretching or doing dry land exercises on the grass. And then swimming for two hours. And then in the afternoon, back in again. Five, six hours of day. That's how you became the best.

Back in the seventies, a little girl used to swim in this pool, and when she was fourteen, she set the world record in the butterfly. My father was home from Conant that summer, and he and his brothers drove up from Elizabethtown to see her come home. He said that the pool was crowded with people and all of them chanted the word _Olympics_ and _gold_. And then the next year, the girl was ready to go to the Olympics, and President Carter said no.

The girl got the news and got back in the pool. She said she could cry over the golds she had lost, or she could work. And she worked. It was what she knew.

In 1981, the girl went to Wisconsin for the U.S. Championship, and she swam so fast, she blistered the water. She set a record so low, no one breathed on it for twenty years. My father was home on leave from Korea, and he lined Trevillian Way with a thousands of other people to welcome her home, watched her sit on the back of a convertible and wave at what seemed like all of Louisville, as those medals dangled around her neck. The pool was packed again when they got to the lake, and all of the people begged her to swim just once more, just once more show them that sub-one minute fly.

They begged her to fly.

They called her Madame Butterfly. They named pools after her, babies after her, even a street in my father's hometown. It was because of her that my father and his brothers fell in love with Belknap, it was because of her that my father got a softness in his face when he talked about how the crowds of people held her so high in the air. What it felt like when he got to the front of the line in 1984 to touch the gold medals she won in Los Angeles while she sat there and blushed and posed for photos. And the girl signed a press photo of herself and saw my dad in his uniform and said, "No, sir, _you're_ the hero."

I had never seen my father so close to crying before he told me about the day Madame Butterfly touched his hand and told him that he was the special one.

We used to get so excited, swimming in the water, thinking that we were swimming in the _same place_, the _same water_ as Mary T. Meagher until my cousin Loretta informed us that probably? They had refilled the pool since then. And it was like something had been lost. The water didn't feel as fast anymore, as slippery and clean.

Then Rachel came.

I felt bad about how we ignored her: for years, she wasn't that big of a deal. She was a swim coach with Lakeside, she would compete at Nationals, at Worlds, and not win, so no big whoop. She didn't go to Atlanta or Sydney—she was no Madame Butterfly. When we left Louisville for Stoneybrook, Rachel was just a really good swimmer, maybe one of the best, but not enough to make a fuss over. Not enough. And it was sad, maybe a bit. Rachel had started swimming when she was fifteen, and in two years, she won a full scholarship to Kentucky, she won all kinds of titles there…she was among the very best.

You think we would have cared about a story like that, some great life lesson.

I didn't notice her until the summer before ninth grade. Because Rachel was going to Athens to swim the fly.

The morning that Lewis and I were supposed to leave for basketball camp, I woke up too early; I was jet-lagged, cranky and annoyed at the world, and I grabbed a cup of coffee because I was _that cool_ because I had learned to love coffee in Italy. I shuffled out of Lewis's house and back to the fence—it was four-thirty in the morning, it was darker than dirt, yet under the lights of the pool, there was one body moving back and forth in the lanes.

"Excited?" Lewis yawned, coming to sit next to me on the grass.

"Jet lagged," I snapped. Stupid Lewis and this stupid camp. Bed, give me my bed.

He tipped his head to the pool. "Remember when Rachel Komisarz was just another coach at Lakeside? And now she's an Olympian. This pool's got some heat again, man."

"Yeah," I said, narrowing my eyes to follow the shadow of her body. Leaping up, plunging down. Leaping up, plunging down. For hours, she would do that. At five, the club swimmers started arriving, so I walked on down to the lake, sneaking in with a group of kids and heading over to where Rachel had been swimming.

She had changed her whole life—she had ruined her back and did swimming to heal herself and found her calling. I could do that, I could change everything. I could be the Logan I wanted—the guy who was _so_ not his dad. I kneeled by the side of the pool and stuck my hands in. I could be whomever I wanted, I could succeed in any sport, I just had to work. I had been watching swimmers for years, I knew what it took.

I sat there with my skin below the surface, and I decided: when I got back from the camp, I was going to be a swimmer. I'd do it. Just like Rachel, I'd put in six, seven hours in the water. My father never swam, but he loved it—he loved Madame Butterfly, and everyone loves an Olympian. I was going to do this—this is what I was going to be.

A hand touched my shoulder. "Testing the water?"

I jumped back up and looked at Rachel, her hair in a wet bun on her head. "I live on the bluff," I kinda sorta lied. "We wanted to know if the water was warm yet."

"No," she grinned, turning away.

My breath caught in my throat—say good luck. Say have fun, say something.

Say thank you. She wasn't Madame Butterfly—but she was better. She had saved my life.

Because this idea was going to get my life back from my father's hands.

Life didn't turn out like I thought. Not a swimmer, no Olympics, and now I was married with a baby, maybe? It was almost too complicated to contemplate. So I scooted closer to the fence and tried to remember how easy it was back then. But I couldn't remember a time that it was ever easy.

"Kerry has you on a flight that leaves here at eleven, goes to Cincy, then on to JFK. And then a girl named Mallory is going to drive you to Stoneybrook," Lewis announced, sitting down next to me. "You've been out here for awhile? Do you want to stay or come inside, get something to eat?"

"I need time to think," I mumbled, staring out at the water.

Lewis rubbed my shoulder and went back inside. A few minutes later, he came back with a few books and magazines. "For me, _Sports Illustrated_. For you, I grabbed _East of Eden_ because you are a predictable bastard, but Kerry also gave me these." He handed me four books. "_Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants_ shit. For some reason, she thought you'd want to read them."

I ran my fingers over the cover of the first book. "Oh, wow. Kerry remembered. These are her favorite books—Mary Anne hid them under her mattress in college. She and her three best friends call themselves The Sisterhood of the Traveling Belt. Geeks," I grinned. "I read them once, because she loves them? But I don't remember them much. Other than there were pants that travel."

Lewis's face slumped. "Didn't one of those friends of Mary Anne's die?"

She did. Barbara did. Barbara died. I chewed on my lip and screwed my eyes shut. All I could see was Mary Anne when she had that heart attack three years ago, her body stiffening and then going limp in my arms. How they stripped her and shoved tubes down her throat, how they shocked her small body, making his leap in the air. Making her fly up.

And she died. She died, she _died_, I saw her ghost because she _died_.

She came back to us, but Barbara was here then. She came back to us because there was more here than on the other side. Was I enough now? Even if there was no Richard in her life, I was enough, right?

I pulled my legs up to my chest, cuddling that book between my thighs and my chest. I kept my eyes closed until the blackness popped over with colors like insane, droopy fireworks. Like the explosion of bombs.

"Barbara," I begged. "Don't let her stay with you. Make her come back."


	29. Chapter 26: Barbara

May. Emmy. Randa. Nick. Logan. Cecily. Stacey. My father. Sometimes, even my mother.

They all speak to me.

When they talk all at once, I feel like I am about to split apart, like one of those stars that fold inside of itself before exploding, creating a huge dark hole where light once was. Their need, their love, it yanks me from place to place, and it's hard to be with one and not hear another.

It's why I stay away. It's why I stayed away from May from so long, her heartache pulling me into orbit around her, making my knees buckle with how much I missed her. Don't tell Amelia—May is my very best friend. But I bet Amelia knows. She used to watch me a lot at first; she handled it all so much better, coming here to the after. But that was why she was the strong one, the smart one, the dependable one.

I was always just Barbara, Celia's sister. Barbara, Amelia's best friend. It wasn't until I met Mary Anne that I began to bloom. Like flowers in a memory garden. When I saw Amelia again, the third thing I said to her was, _Thank you for bringing me Mary Anne_.

I have not sent her someone yet. There are so many people in the world, getting them to line up just right is so hard. That tap on the shoulder of someone's heart is a hard thing to do—and I am not around enough. I will find someone, I promise you. Still—I knew, I knew I could make it so May wasn't alone when she fell. And I could make it happen—all I had to do was bother Mariah. And then make sure that Mallory Pike left in her red hair dye for a bit too long by blowing the windows in her dorm room open, scattering all of her papers with the wind that I urged into her room.

As she gathered the sheets in her arms, her hair went from chestnut to auburn to a carrot color that made her stare in surprise. Hair the same color as mine.

That would make May stay, I figured, if she thought I was there.

But I never got it right, not in school. I could make a body move, linking arms and legs and hips together in a fluid, explosive way. I could assemble a weapon and fire a wink of a shot far on the horizon. Mechanics, making the best way that things work. But people…people never do what you want to.

May thought she was supposed to follow. I didn't know that I had taken the lead. Neither of us was supposed to get ahead of the other: we were equal, balanced. No wonder she got lost. No wonder she did what she did.

Leave. Come with me.

Her hand slipped in with mine as we stood on the shore of my favorite beach. The warm water of Italy, the stone faces of the cliffs in Positano, the sand from Tel Aviv. Amelia was in the distance, and May's people were there. Tim. Her mother. Her grandparents. Her baby.

I wasn't going to let her leave my side, to go to them, to slip into that warm circle like a favorite shirt, nuzzling against the softness of it all. No. I had to push her back to the place that you wait, not the place behind the door. Where you come to end it all.

She had been here once: to say goodbye to her son. And I saw the temptation in her eyes when she saw the sea—and it wasn't her time. She couldn't be here, I had to get her away.

"Close your eyes," I told her.

May looked so lovely, just the normal girl I once knew, her body small but strong. Full where it was now empty, flat where it was now inflating. And her hair, her hair—it was coming out of her hair like threads on an unraveling hem as she was loaded into the ambulance. Oh, looking at May was so hard when she was sick, the broken down house of herself where she lived. I knew what a body looked like when it was destroyed.

I saw my own. At least I didn't have to live in it.

When she opened her eyes, we were in the midst of a whirlwind, so much noise and movement. A man in a purple shirt ran by, shouting, "I need the Dodgers infield stats _now,_ Becky!"

Across the large newsroom, a girl jumped up from her desk and scurried over to the man—and she passed Emily who was bent over a copy machine and giving it a kick before punching a few buttons. The machine rumbled to life, scanning her document and making her face burst in its green light.

She came walking back to us, meeting Becky as they went to a cubicle in the far side of the room. "Honestly," Becky muttered. "You think it's the start of World War III and not a freakin' trade for some pitcher."

"Oh, but it's the trade of the century!" Emily snorted. "Whatever. I'm going to go drown in the sea of hyperbole."

Becky reached over a boy for a soda when the phone rang. She put it next to her ear, saying, "This is Rebecca Browne?...Just a sec." She handed it to Emily. "Logan?"

May grabbed my arm. "Why are we here? What's going on?"

"Listen," I urged, pointing at Emily as she frowned, taking the phone from Becky.

Emily leaned against the corner of her cubicle and snapped a can of soda open. "Hey, what's up?" And the soda slipped through her hand; it crashed on the floor and belched out its contents over her shoes as she slid down into a crouch. She sat there, holding her knees as the other interns stared at her, sopping up the spilled soda with napkins.

Emily began slamming her hand on the desk until she found a pen. On her hand, she wrote, _Amniotic fluid embolism_. "How fatal?" she pressed. She listened for a moment, and then squealed, "Why didn't you ask? Logan, come on, you can't trust doctors like that!"

"Stop yelling at him," May snapped, but Emily was standing back up, her whole body shaking, as she said, "I'm on my way to Stoneybrook. I'll call you once I get a flight. And hey—she's going to be okay, ignore everybody. If someone tells you that she's not going to make it, tell them to fuck the hell off, understand?"

After another moment of silence, she added, "Okay. Bye, Lee." The trembling heap of Emily went over to one of the computers and typed in that phrase, but her fingers hit so many letters, there was only a jumble in the search engine.

So she put her head in her hands and sobbed as the interns stared, as the people in the cubicles near her stood and watched, as everyone caught in the middle of the Trade of the Century, of recording it and reporting it and making meaning of it, slowed as if tarred and stared at Emily.

May turned and looked at me. "Miranda would be next. Please, please, don't let her be Randa to him, please, Babsie."

In the instant she blinked, we were on a wooden porch in the middle of the woods. Randa flipped a page in her magazine as she pushed herself back and forth on a rocking chair. "She looks so bored, don't you think?" I giggled.

"She hates Vermont," May said, her eyes so sad, so full of Emmy. "She was so pissed that Ry got to skip out because of summer school and all. At least Micah's here."

"Yeah, but she has to share Micah with his fiancé, and you know how Randa feels about sharing her brother," I noted, and she smiled at me, actually smiled. I took her hand again while Mrs. Schillabar made her way onto the porch with a cordless phone in her hands.

"It's Logan—he sounds strange," her mother said, passing her the phone.

"It's Logan, he's always strange," Randa snorted. I saw her eyebrows raise—Randa was so transparent, you could see her thinking, _But Logan's better than sitting on a fucking porch in fucking Vermont staring at fucking trees_. "Hey, Lee, where's Ms. May?"

"I can't watch," May breathed, spinning around and pressing her hands over her eyes. "Please, I can't watch."

We stood and breathed for a moment in the quiet and then in the siren of Randa's scream before stepping into a house behind Logan, his arms full of the _Sisterhood_ books. On the back cover of the top book, his thumb was brushing over the name _Lena_. May was our Lena. This was how he kept himself together, holding on tight to something so Mary Anne.

May turned to me as he mumbled something to his family. "He looks so tired," she trembled, leaning her head on my shoulder. "This has got to be killing him, to be here when I'm there. Or my body—you know what I mean," she mumbled, her cheekbones streaking with blush. "It's his worst nightmare, that…that something happens to me when he's not there. He—"

A crash made us jump, a casserole flung to the ground, Logan standing in the middle of jagged pieces of a dish, food splattered all over the room. He shouted, ""She's not dead! Stop acting like she is!" In a blur of red, he ran back past us. Through us, our bodies dissolving like smoke.

"Am I dead?" May breathed as the lines of her came back in to focus, giving Mary Anne shape again.

"No," I told her. "But I won't let you go to that beach. I won't let you. Because you won't come back. That water has a song, May, it wants you to come home."

She licked her lips, staring behind her where Logan had been. "Last time, I was in my bedroom with my mother. Why is it different? And where is she?"

"With your baby," I sighed, holding her closer. "Her and your grandparents, they never leave his side."

Her hair fell in front of her face, the long brown hair that I remember from middle school. I brushed it back from her eyes. "Good," she whispered. "I love him so much, I want Mom to be with him."

My fingers roped up in my hair, and I began tugging on the curls, that soothing feel of my hair bouncing against my skin. "May, I adore you, but if you see that baby, I am so scared that you won't go back."

May looked behind her, at the house teeming with people, all speaking in a blue hush of voices, "I…where is he?"

"Who he?" I asked. And May's eyes met mine before she closed them.

It was dark and blue-green, a shadowed, cold place, here under the water. Logan was curled up in a ball, his face tipped up to the surface of the lake, a broken spring of a boy. There was no jump in him, hiding here, far away from anyone who would tell him that his wife would die.

I bit my lip and thought of Nick—no, _no_. No. Think about Mary Anne, not myself. Focus. _Help_.

May was a fog, drifting to him like a blotch of sunlight. "Logan," she whispered, pressing against him. His skin began to lighten, a gold outline over his shoulders, where her head was resting. "Angel." His face turned to where her was, and she drifted a hand over his cheek. "Don't be scared."

_I was just like my dad. And her dad. I got angry, and then I ran away_, a voice said, echoing like the bass bells they strike to mourn the dead in Tel Aviv. Dead like me. _She picked me, and I failed her_.

"You didn't fail me," May insisted, her features blurring as she pressed closer to him, losing herself in his skin. "You fail me if you don't get out of this water as the Logan I know. You've been scared before: remember the day with the problem in your head? You were scared, but you came back. Everybody's allowed to have moments that don't go right. No one is perfect. Do you hear me? I love you, do you hear me?"

He kept looking up at the water's surface until a shine on his hand lit up like a candle—the ring on his left hand that Mary Anne was twisting around. A flash of fingers, a wave of a face: he saw it all. _I do_. In a hail of bubbles, he pushed off the floor of the lake and popped back up to the surface, stroking back to the edge.

"Do you want to stay with him?" I asked, watching his body haul out of the lake, the watery reflecting of him racing around the pool and out of sight. He would be fine, he would treat this like a game, maneuvering everyone around him to make the best patterns, the best fits. To achieve the result that he wanted: to win.

To keep Mary Anne alive.

"I trust him—even if I hadn't come, Logan would have talked himself back strong," May stated, her eyes following where he was. "I want to be with him, but I don't need to watch him." She pressed her lips together, flattening the rose of it into a thin line. "I have somewhere else to go."

So we stood in front of her body, her body naked from the waist up, skin covered in blood as they inserted a tube down the center of her chest. To match the one in he rmouth that was breathing for her. May grabbed my arm, crumbling down on her feet as the doctors stared at machines, at her body, as someone inserted a needle in her stomach.

May jumped up and put her hands on her body. "My baby, me…am I okay? I want to go back, Babs, let me go back."

"You know how. I'll be waiting for you," I promised, watching her run her hands down her body, enjoying the feel of it. I could see the guilt in her fingers as she touched her chest, the way that they explored the terrain of her breasts. I had wondered—what if I had lived? Without my arm? Or blind, I went blind before I died from the heat that hit my eyes. What if I had to carry that with me.

I would want to die. The day of May's mastectomy, she told us not to come, but Randa and Emmy and I had sat together that morning at the Waffle Hut, and we played a game—what would we be able to lose and keep going? Breasts. Legs. Sight, hearing. What was the line? What would break us?

"Breasts," Randa whispered. She hid her face in her hands. "I…I don't think I could take it if I lost my breasts, not at seventeen, no way. I'd rather die of cancer, I really think so."

"May sounded so shocked," Emmy sighed, cutting into her pancakes, smearing the smiling face of whipped cream. "I'm scared she might be lying a bit about just wanting to do whatever saves her."

"No," I assured her. "She wants this—well, not this, but anything to save her. Her mom didn't do treatment and died. No matter what, May wants to fight this."

Battles have costs. Battles leave scars. If they don't kill. I glanced at my hands, and for a moment, the skin shredded away, leaving burn and bone behind. When I looked back, she was sliding back into her skin. For now, she was home. For now, she was back. I turned around and walked through the doctors, the wall, stepping off of the ground and lifting up, over Sharon Spier sobbing while talking on the phone, Jeff and some other girl leaving with car keys in her hand as they walked out of the door.

There comes a point where you can stop pretending—stop walking and respecting space, stop being a body that behaves like all of the other bodies.

If I could, I would go back. If I could, I would be alive. But this isn't so bad, being here, being this Barbara who can make a night sky light up with memories of Nick, make the stars slide around in loops and comets and spell his name. A Barbara who can make clouds curl into _Felicity_ hair, May's hair, and make grass ripple with the sound of Miranda's laugh. Arrange stones into essays as strong as Emily's, and turn flower gardens into poems for my sister.

Magic and mystery are your skin now. And everything, everything you want is just a breath away. Unless those things are alive.

I escaped up into the sky and ran my hands over the air to make Nick's face erupt for a moment, the way he looked when he first kissed me and then sank back into a room with a bed and two shut doors.

Amelia was sitting on the desk chair, making it spin as she pushed on the carpet. Her light brown hair swung around her face, the face of a girl shedding her childhood but not yet. Not ever. I always thought that I had died young, but I had six more years than she did. Her green eyes flickered on the bed and then me. "You still cool with me being here?"

"You and me, we're a team," I grinned.

"She won't mind, right?" Amelia replied. "I mean, you and her are you and her."

"And you and me are you and me. May gets it," I declared.

I glanced behind me at the bed, and May appeared, clutching her hands together as she looked around her old bedroom in Stoneybrook. In the rebuilt house from where one was burned to the ground. Her face crimsoned, her eyes bright with tears. "I'm back here? I thought I would just wake up."

"Your body is tired, Mary An—May," Amelia explained, spinning again. "It's not that easy. But you know how this is. You know how to get back. We'll stay with you."

May looked down at her belly, rubbing over the lack of rise there with her left hand. "I have my rings," she murmured. "I have my rings. It really hurt before, to get my whole body back, to be complete, but not really complete because I didn't have them." She blinked, still touching her abdomen. "I want my baby to be here, too."

Amelia glanced at me, and I shrugged, sitting down next to May and rubbing her shoulders. "Let's take a nap, okay? When you wake up, maybe you'll be well enough to go."

May bit her lip. "Is Dawn okay? Stacey? Where is my dad?" She knocked on her skull and moaned, "Why didn't I go and see them, too? I mean—"

"Mary Anne Baker Spier," I declared. "You do what you have to do to get back. If you said to Dawn or Stacey, would you have preferred me visiting you or fighting my way back to life, what do they pick?"

I avoided her father. I couldn't hurt her now, no, I couldn't. I loved her too much to break her heart. Break her already crackled heart.

Her face relaxed, but her eyes edged over at the bathroom door, the gold glow of it, gold like summer sand. "You promise I'll get to leave, right?" May whispered.

"Yes." I urged her down to the bed, holding her in my arms like a lover, like her lover, stroking her hair back as she shuddered each breath until falling into sleep. Oh, my May, I will stand guard over you until I send you someone. Your mother holds your son, and she and I watch over you, but I—I will protect you.

But I cannot protect you from what is coming. There is only so much time we all have, put in our bodies, stuffed in like sand, and it runs down out of our blood and into the world. It expires. It ends.

When I was alive, there were days when I felt so bouyant, a dizziness would sweep over me like a hand. Was it because I was lighter than those around me, empty of time? Amelia spoke of a certainty that she was full of air. Maybe that is the padding where our time should be. We only get so much.

And my May, I cannot give her more time. November is coming, November is coming, and it is waiting to drain her of her last days.

"I love you," I told her. From the sounds of her honey-smooth breath, I could tell she was asleep. I looped a strand of her long, straight hair around my finger and added, "And I'm so sorry I can't save you."

But I will orbit you. I will listen to no voice but yours. I will watch and see what I can save and do and create so I can give you more time.


	30. Chapter 27: Mary Anne

**Author's Note**: Hey! Where have I gone—well, good news and great news (which is also kind of bad news because it's the thing sucking up all of my time). First off, my brother is doing great—he's walking again, though a bit unsteadily, and the recovery is going slowly but very well. So it's not his fault that I've disappeared—okay, it was in December but not anymore. It's partially work and partially school—meaning that I have a huge project on my hands: I'm editing and rewriting _Meant to Be_ to change it from fanfiction into a standalone novel. I have a workshop this term where we are working on it, and in the spring, I'm doing an independent study to continue this process. It is grueling and time-consuming, but it's worth it (I think?). So, if updates continue on this slow pace, blame _MTB_. But I'll try my darnedest to get more up here soon. Take care!! OLB

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His hand was warm on my forehead, stroking back the stubborn cling of hair that refused to fall out. He gave me a wink and pressed his lips against my temple, breathing _pretty girl_ into my ear as his fingers slipped around to cradle my cheek. I closed my eyes and bent into his face, riding on the cold mint scent of his breath. Because he was talking to me. Because I could hear.

The doctor shuffled around on the other side of the bed. "Okay, Mary Anne, on the count of three, I'm going to pull the tube out. I'll need you to give me a real big exhale, okay? You'll probably cough after it's out, and your throat is going to be hurting a lot, and your voice is a bit shot, so—"

"She knows," Logan said in a voice lower than a current, his lips twitching slightly as he kissed my temple again. "She's done this before."

"Right," the doctor replied. He pressed the release button on the ventilator and then gripped the stub of the tube. "On three. One, two, three," he counted, pulling hard on the tube as I heaved air out of my lung. It felt like a bone was being pried from my body, leaving my throat and chest slippery and weak in its wake. The tube left my mouth, and I began hacking, clutching hard at Logan's shirt as I coughed. Coughed and reeled back into my lung for a first breath. And then a second. A third, a fourth, I was back. The sandpaper-struck feeling of my throat was radiating a dry pain down my limbs, but it didn't matter. I was back. I was here.

It had only been the day before that everything had locked into place: the ability to move my body and have my mind and myself move in concert. Knowing where I was every moment that I was awake, not suffocated by a confusion of time and place and people. And my lungs had begun working more than the machine. Everything clicked in. I had been in this daze for a week, and it felt like a year, and I missed my life so much that a mourning had settled on my skin, as tangible as my husband's hands on my body. I wanted out of this bed. I wanted out of this hospital.

I wanted everything that was mine again. No dying.

Logan kissed the back of my hand and held it against his cheek as he grinned at me. "So, I say we jailbreak. I'll grab the car, you toss on some clothes, and I'll meet you by the back dumpsters, how about that?"

Despite the burn on its skin from the intubation tape, my lips bent up into a smile. _Yes_, I mouthed. Because I could. _I love you_.

"I love you," he beamed. I raised my free hand and tapped my lips, and he laughed. "I thought you'd never ask." He leaned down and brushed his lips against mine, and my hand looped around the back of his head and pressed him closer. The crackle in my heart, like flint on rock, began to pop, and I held him tight to me. His thumb moved under my ear, and he broke away to whisper, "It should be illegal, Tess, that you can be lying here like this and still look sexy."

_Stop it_, I scolded, urging him back to me. After we kissed again, he tucked his head against my neck and hand his palm over my chest, kneading the space above my heart. My heart, my battered heart. But it was still here, too. It had failed, but it had stumbled back to itself, rewinding the clock to restart, this heart. It had gone through so much—had he cradled it all week, kept it safe, whispering to it how much he loved me, and loved us, and that this poor heart had to come back?

Yes. It was his heart, too. Yes.

I kissed the top of his head and waited for his eyes to turn back to me. _Angel. What happened while I was sleeping?_

He shifted a bit to rest his chin on my chest. "It's long, are you sure you don't want to rest? Want me to get everyone and bring them in? They're all anxious to see you, pretty girl."

_I want to know_, I urged, running my fingers over the fuzz of his hair as he nodded and pressed his lips together as he thought over all that I had missed, ordering in the best way for me. He kept everything for me, didn't he. We both startled, though, and whipped our eyes at the nurse as she walked in to take my vital signs. She chatted with me, bright words of little consequence. Before she left, she scribbled something on my chart and gave me a smile.

"All set, Ms. Baker. Just page me if you need me," she winked, slipping back out the door. I tipped my head at Logan and gave him a searching look. _Baker?_

He sat up straight and laced his fingers with mine, both hands roped together. "You might not want to be a Spier, but you aren't a Bruno, Mary Anne. I figured…the Bakers loved you so much, you were their beloved Mary Anne, and—your mother was a Baker. So. For now, that's what I think you should go by, if you want. I can have them change it back, it's just what I had them put on the charts and stuff."

Mary Anne Baker Spier. Mary Anne Baker. Mary Anne Bruno—that had always sounded weird, my vanilla name with the hard ethnicity of his. Mary Anne Baker, though. It worked. Or, at least it worked for now. Until a bridge could be built between my father and I. My father.

_Tell me what has happened this week_, I repeated, holding our hands against my chest.

Logan bent down and kissed my stomach, resting against the rise of my belly with his eyes shut for a long moment. When he opened them, he said, "Your heart stopped, and the world stopped spinning. And when they both started again, everything went too fast and too crazy. The only thing that stayed still was you. Oh. And Emily dyed her hair red."

I blinked. Okay.

He grinned, creeping up from my belly, his hands still rubbing there—could he feel the kicks under my skin, the flutter of the baby's feet? My heart had stopped for two seconds—did it know? Did it know any of this, or was it still tumbling along, happy and carefree, unaware that its brother left behind a poison for my blood? Maybe. This baby was here, and it was strong. Strong like me.

Like my husband, I thought, rubbing my thumb over his cheekbones. I held his face and mouthed, _Babs says hi_.

He froze, his hand drifting up to his mouth. His eyes grew bright, and he wiped at them quickly with the backs of his hands. "Did she stay with you?"

I nodded. He waited, but I wasn't going to say more. Not now.

"Well, I'll fill you in then," he said simply, giving me a novel with his eyes. I curled my finger under his chin, and he smile again, the sunrise of his lips, and came back up to me to kiss me. His tongue slipped past my lips and whispered down the length of my own, a little pink tickle that pinpricked a want up and down my spine.

I want you. _I need you_, I breathed. _And I love you_.

Logan stayed an inch from my mouth and whispered, "Once upon a time, there was a pretty girl whose heart and lungs got their asses kicked. So, the doctor put her in a deep sleep for way too freakin' long as her body recovered. And this sleep left this gorgeous woman's husband alone with a bunch of slightly insane people. And for that reason alone, the husband is nearly weeping with joy that his wife is back because now, he isn't alone."

_You're never alone_, I mouthed. _I'm always with you_.

"You were with Babs," Logan countered, touching my skin,

I licked my lips, the scraggled feel of my chapped skin under my wet tongue making me shiver. _I'll tell you my story if you tell me yours_.

"Once upon a time, there was a pretty girl and her best friend, Barbara. And they waited for a long time for the girl to be able to come back?" he began.

_Once upon a time, I love you_. I pulled him in close, to feel his breath on my skin. _That's where my story always begins._


	31. Chapter 28: Logan

The drive from the airport was silent, just Jeff and Mallory and me, and the large cloud of why cramming in Mallory's small car.

I couldn't breathe. Even though she had the air conditioning on, I rolled down my window and let the wind in. I couldn't breathe. Could Mary Anne?

Jeff was in the backseat, the charger cord of his cell phone stretched tight from the outlet on the dashboard. I could hear him talking to Sharon, I could understand without speaking to her what was going on: nothing. No change. Just Mary Anne, in a hospital, away from me. When I rubbed my face with my hand, the edge of my wedding ring hit my nose, and I startled. It rocked me back like a slap.

I didn't have the time to mope or cry. I had my breakdown, but I saw her with me, in the swirl of the blue lake, and she built me back up, like she always did. I was her husband. She needed me.

And I needed her. So no dying. Hear me, pretty girl? No dying.

I'm coming, I'm on my way…hold on.

When Mallory pulled us off of the freeway to begin the last leg to Stoneybrook, I finally looked at her. Damn, when had her hair gotten so red? Red like blood. No, red like Barbara's hair. Babs, my fake girlfriend, please tell me you're with my Mary Anne. And tell me that you won't let her stay with you.

She noticed me staring and shot me a sheepish smile. "I have no clue what happened," she shrugged, reaching up to touch a bit of it. "I was going for auburn, but I got distracted or something…anyway, this is what I got right now."

"It's real nice," I said. "I had a friend with hair that color, I always thought it was pretty."

Quiet fell between us like a blanket. What was I supposed to say? Chat her up on her summer internship? Ask her about her graduation from Riverbend? Knit up small talk like my wife knits sweaters, just piling stupid words between us so that we would forget why a girl I hadn't spoken to in nearly ten years was driving me somewhere so fast that I was certain that we were flying?

"So," Mallory said after a moment, making me jump again. I could hear Jeff talking again, but the hysterical voice echoing out of the phone wasn't Sharon's. Not calm, collected Sharon. Dawn. Oh, God, Dawn. Dawn and Emily and Randa and Stacey—how were they? Randa had dissolved into screams. Emily had been brusque and firm, but there was this weird tremor in her voice that sounded like the warning rumbles before an earthquake. So soon after Babs's birthday. Too soon.

I looked over at her, and for a moment, I wanted all of the stupid words, if they would cover up the sound of Dawn's voice. "Yeah?"

"So, I'm going to Michigan in the fall?" Mallory began, her voice so carefully light. "And I saw, UNC plays us in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. You're coming to my school, Logan. I'll see you play."

Ohio State my freshman year, Wisconsin last year, and yes, Michigan. I nodded. "Yeah. I'll email you before we come. We should meet up or something." Lies, lies. Mary Anne hated lies. But it was so much easier than to say, _There's no time._ Off the plane, play, back on the plane. No time for something more than a hello, a sweaty hug, and then a wave goodbye. And then see her when we land. All of my time arrows to her.

Tell me I have more time with my wife, _please_.

Mallory smiled at me and nodded, too. "Okay, great." And she turned her face back to the road as the car was now twenty miles per hour over the limit, and I could see a bit of relief on her face. _My job is done. I talked normal to him. Good on me._

When she dropped Jeff and me at the hospital, her tires squealed. The rubber sounded relieved to get away, too. Her job was done. Thanks, Ry.

We stood in front of the hospitals doors, and my feet refused to move. They were locked there on the pavement. Why? My Mary Anne was in there, why?

I felt a hand on my arm and looked down, and her fingers wrapped over my skin, and I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, she was there.

"Angel," Mary Anne whispered, and I dropped my gym bag and my school bag in the tiny hallway of our hotel room and picked her up in my arms. She was so light, like a murmur, and I tucked my arm under her legs and kissed her as I kicked the door shut. We were leaving the next day for the NCAAs, traveling down the highway to Charlotte for what they called an away game, but was really in our backyard. Outside the windows, it was just another gray March day, but we had spent our nights all week here. I needed her like a salve on my nerves. It was my second post-season, and this year, there was no Superstar to hide behind. I had to be in charge. Run the point—be the floor general, ol' General Lee.

But he lost. And I didn't want to. But the fear, it ate at me the moment practice ended, when all eyes on campus stared at me. When strangers came up and said, _This is our year, Number Ten!_ I held Mary Anne tighter as her tongue slid into my mouth and licked against mine. She tasted sweet and warm, cinnamon on my tongue.

"You're scared," Mary Anne said in a hush, touching my face as I laid her on the bed.

"I am," I admitted, kicking off my shoes. I'm terrified. I've left the court, and it's all crashing down. Help me.

Mary Anne lifted up and grabbed my shirt, pulling me on top of her and holding me so that I blanketed her. I ran my fingers in the curls of her hair, my fingers lost in the ink of it all. "I love you," she said, kissing each of my closed eyes. "And I am always beside you. Don't be scared."

I nodded a few times, my voice stuck somewhere I couldn't reach. Except: "I love you, _tesorina_. And I am going to marry you."

"And I will be your wife," she whispered, and as her hand reached for the waistband of my pants, I reached under her skirt to pull down her underwear. She wrestled down the pants and the boxers, and they caught around my knees, just enough. "We're going to live in a house, we're going to have J.D. and kids, and we're going to be so happy."

Wrapping my arms behind her, I arched my back so that I could keep looking at her face as I pushed inside of her, her face going tight and then smoothing out in something that always looked like a smile—this slack-lipped look of happiness. And she rose up to kiss me so fiercely, I had to hold hard to her to not lean back as I rocked into her.

"Say it again," I asked her, our hips meeting.

"I am going to be your wife," Mary Anne repeated, her voice higher now as she held tight to my shoulders. I could see it in her eyes: _more_. "I am, and you will be my husband, and we're going to have a life so much bigger than what will happen in these next few weeks. Our life is so much bigger than wins or losses," she said. She promised.

I put my mouth on those lips that were saying those words. If you say it, it will be true, it will. Her voice, it's deeper than all roses. I held her tight and pushed with her, and we lost the ability to make words, just kissing and staring at eyes that were a blink apart from each other. _This will be my wife, this woman_. I gathered all of my energy to focus hard, to bear down, to look in those eyes that were attached to a body that felt like home and say, "I know."

And now, she is my wife.

And she has my baby in her. That we made the night before that one. That we made before I left for games and lost, that basket hitting wrong and falling lame to the floor. The blame I carried for months, so much heavier than her, though her hands urged me to finally let it go.

And I am standing here, like an ass, staring.

For God's sake, Logan. Get on your game face and _be_ her husband.

There was a hand on my arm, and I looked down. A boy's fingers—Jeff. "You okay?" he asked.

I could feel her still, her hands on my face, my hips, tangled with my own fingers. "Yes," I nodded. And I did not lie.

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You'd think that a tragedy would bring people together. It would take arguments and just wipe them off the table with the flick of a hand.

You obviously don't know the people I do.

Within an hour of everyone congregating in a waiting room at Stoneybrook's hospital, there were fights raging, and I sat back with Emily in the corner of the room and raised my eyebrows. "If it wasn't so damn ridiculous? I'd be sitting here with popcorn," I sighed, watching Dawn and Stacey yell, Randa and Ry yell, Sharon yell into her phone.

"Oh, I vote for popcorn now," Emily nodded, clicking on another webpage. More research for Mary Anne. "This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better." Her hair was now a rich red color, something she blamed on boredom and an annoying roommate. What was with girls and dying their hair? Can't you just be happy with what you got?

This had to stop.

I stood up and put my hands on my head. "Hey—_hey_!" The room silenced, and I glared around. "Hi, remember me? I just had to okay putting my wife into a drug-induced coma so she can recover, and I'm not really in a headspace to deal with your shit. So can you please take it outside?" Wait a sec. "You know? What is the fighting even about in the first place?" I added in an exasperated tone.

"She's a witch," Randa said bitterly, pointing at her sister.

"Yeah? And?" Ry countered, putting her hands on her hips.

Randa gave her an icy glare. "Such a freakshow, God, I can't believe I'm related to you!"

"Uh, hi? _Who_ is in your CD player right now, _Hillary Duff_?" Ry scoffed, wheeling her head back. "Who's the freak here?"

This was hitting new heights of stupidity. I let out a whistle and gave them both hard stares. "This is nothing new—you two have been fighting about this shit since before I knew you. How about you stow it and save it for when you all get together for the High Holidays, okay? Ry? Go home," I ordered.

"I came here for you, Wally," Ry sighed, coming over to me.

For what? Just in case I need juice? Her and her voodoo—I knew it so well. "I know you did," I said with a small smile. What the hell. I reached down and gave her a hug. "Thanks, Ry, but I'm okay."

"No more jumping in lakes," she whispered in my ear, and the scent of smoke hit my nose. "Everybody gets one. But that was it."

"I know," I said again, patting her back. How did she—aw, hell, it's Ry, do you really have to ask these things?

Still, she believed in me. This is why she came: Ry had always believed in me, and she was here, this dark-shaded reminder of faith. She pulled back and gave me a curt nod, slinging her courderoy bag over her body. "I'm going back to Ohio then. If you need me, I'm only a phone call away."

"Wouldn't you know I was calling before I called?" I asked, tilting my head at her.

Ry gave me a grin and gave her nose a wiggle. "Stay whole, Wally," she said in goodbye, giving Randa one last glare before leaving the room.

Don't worry, Ry, I will.

"She's a character," Sharon said in a bemused tone, sinking into a chair.

"Randa's right, she's a freakshow," Dawn sniffed, giving her short hair a toss.

"And you're a bitch," Stacey spat.

I held up my hands. "Now, what the hell is wrong with _you_ two?" I demanded.

Randa raised her hand eagerly. "Ooh, call on me, I know!" She pointed at Dawn. "When Stacey had to pick Dawn up to go to the airport? Guess where Dawn was?"

Stacey crossed her arms over her chest, a snotty, cold look sneering her face. "Ooh, let me answer. At her lover's house, fucking his brains out. Tell me, was my final graded yet, or was he waiting to come before he put on the A?"

"Fuck you, Stacey! We're not even having sex!" Dawn exploded.

"That's it!" I yelled. I went over to Stacey and squatted so that we were at eyelevel. "You? Are being a heinous, massive bitch. You know that Henry is a quality guy, and that he'd never pull that kind of crap on you." I put my hands on her arms as lightly as I dared. "You and I both know where this is coming from." And it rhymes with _I love Davis, but I'm terrified of it_. Oh, wait, no, that's exactly it. "This has to stop. Deal with it, and stop piling it out on Dawn."

I glanced at my sister-in-law and raised an eyebrow. "But you? If you lie and sneak one more time? I swear to God, I'm siccing Ry on you. It's over, Dawn. Something worth doing and having is not worth doing in secret, and it's total bullshit that you're engaging in romantic subterfuge." Straightening up, I sighed. "Be adults, for Christ's sake. Be _adults_. And work it out."

"Nice work, Dr. Phil," Randa snarked from her chair.

"Stow it, Randa," I snapped. I looked over at Sharon. "What's Richard's deal?"

She shook her head. "I can't—he's in shock, I suppose. He can barely process it." Her face was so sad. And for a moment, I felt this well of sympathy for Richard. I understood that—when someone you love so much, so far beyond words, was slipping away, how everything just bottoms out. Here's the thing: they are still there. So you have to get back up.

They are always beside you.

"I'm going to go talk to him," I declared. Taking in a breath, I listed, "Sharon? I need you to stay here, just be with her for me. If anything changes—which it shouldn't—call me. Tell her that I love her every ten minutes," I said, my voice catching slightly, like a sleeve on a nail. Fuck. Okay. "Dawn? Stay with your mom, be assistant cheerleader for my _tesorina_. Emily? Keep researching—and if the doctors come with an update, grill them like a burger, just don't let them get away with their non-answers. Randa? Tag team with her. Between you two, we'll get a full picture."

As the four of them nodded blankly, I looked at Stacey. "You are gonna drive me," I concluded, grabbing her purse and chucking at her. "Let's roll, Stace."

Her eyes widened a bit. "I don't want to sit in—"

"You're just my driver," I interrupted, heading for the door. I paused, though, and turned back. "Guys? We gotta be here for Mary Anne. All of the shit, everything on the outside, it has to stop. This is about her now. If you want to start crap, just go. 'Cause I'm so tattling on all of you when she wakes up," I warned, and I felt a smile finally creep up. There she would be, my _tesorina_, sitting up in her hospital bed, rolling her eyes at all of the insanity and laughing despite herself at everything that had happened while she was sleeping.

Because she would wake up. She would come back, she always did.

Stacey followed me outside, and I waited until we were in the car. Before I could speak, though, she sighed. "Please, don't say it," she whispered, driving us out of the parking lot.

"That you are in love with Davis?" I answered, looking out the window.

She snorted. "Thanks for that." She tapped her fingers against the wheel and then turned the air conditioner higher. "How do you do it? Just—give yourself over so completely? Especially when you know that May could…leave you?" Stacey asked, her fingers going white as she clutched the wheel.

Because she makes me feel fuller than I ever thought I could be. Because with her, I feel stronger as a man. Because with her, I feel _good_. Because she kisses me and touches me, and I know my skin was made for those lips and those hands. Because she knows what I want to say, even when I can't say it—she knows what the silence says. Because she let me be me, just Logan, and makes me know that he's not just okay, he's worth being, even on days where the doubt is so heavy, it's hard to stand. Because she gives me space but stays close. This is why. Because we have grown up together into a man who can handle the world, and a woman who believes that he can. Because I love her, my heart is shaped like her, because—

"I just do," I murmured. I shook my head. "Stace, I don't have an answer, or at least not just one. But you know it, you can feel it—it's tangible, you know? I guess the better way to say is, if you're fighting it as hard as you are, that's when you know that you can do it. Because it's easier just to let someone in than keep them out."

"What if I get hurt?" Stacey whimpered, and at the stopsign, she covered her face in her hands. "Fuck it, it's too late already. He's already dating someone else. I lost my chance."

I rubbed her back in slow circles and looked out the windshield. The sun was striking the hood of her white car and making it gleam like snow. "Stacey. You're talking to the guy whose wife has died and come back twice now. There is no such thing as a lost chance—everything comes back, if there's enough want. And the time to let it happen." Besides. He's not dating her. He's just lying to make you happy. Lies creep up everywhere…

Her head bobbed, and she rubbed her face hard, trailing her hands into her yellow hair. With a sigh, she started the car forward again. We rode in silence, but a block from the Spiers' house, Stacey clicked her tongue. "I'm still pissed that Dawn lied."

"Yeah, well, I'm pissed that you're a righteous bitch sometimes, so it all evens out," I teased, elbowing her lightly.

Stacey pulled into the driveway and gave me a weak smile. "I'll wait here. I have The Bible to read," she said, pulling out an issue of French _Vogue_. I tried not to roll my eyes and got out of the car. The Bible. I crossed myself and reached under my shirt to pull out the cross I wore around my neck, that my grandmother gave me before I flew out here. Help me, _Dio Mio_. I kissed the crucifix and stuffed it back under the cotton before jogging to the door and knocking hard on the door.

Because there was no way in hell I was walking into Richard's house without knocking. No way, son-in-law or not.

The door opened after a minute, and Richard's pale face appeared in the door. He looked terrible, the way I felt inside yesterday. His skin was white, with a yellow shadow to it, unshaven—strange to see in a man that was so bald, the face that wrapped around his mouth and jaw and then stopped. At least he had stopped the comb-over. That was just wrong. Richard was exhausted, and the air of guilt hung on him like a bitter cologne, and I stared at him hard.

Both of us, with sick wives. This could be me.

But I am not my father's son. And I am not my father-in-law's either.

I'm the man that Mary Anne chose.

"Richard, you need to come to her," I said flatly. "Your daughter is so sick. You have to come to her."

"I can't," he said, his voice scratchy. "I told Sharon, I can't."

"Mary Anne loves you—and she needs her dad," I protested. "She needs more than your money, she needs _you_. Damn it, why won't you just be there for her, huh? She's not Alma, Richard, she's fighting her damned ass off to stay with us. Will you just put your shit with your first wife aside and see Mary Anne for who she is?" I looked down at my sneakers, but I forced myself to look back up. "Richard. Stop seeing Alma. You have to see Mary Anne."

He blinked at me, and the door began to close. My hand caught it though. I was a hell of a lot stronger than he was. "In six or so months, there will be a baby. And it will be part of you. And part of your wife. You have six months, then, to get your shit together. I'm not too proud to take your money to keep her alive, and I am grateful for it, you don't even _know_ how much. But—she's gonna need you and big time. You have until November, Richard," I told him, taking my hand off of the door.

I braced myself for an immediate slam, but her just stared at me with his blank eyes. And I could have sworn he nodded before the door came to a quiet close.

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We took turns that week, staying with her—well, they did. I stayed always, showering in the small bathroom of her room, sleeping on a cot that was jammed next to her bed. I stayed, watching DVDs on my laptop with my earbuds in so I wouldn't hear Randa nattering on about some movie star, Stacey discuss fashion or economics, my mother prattle on about soap opera characters and why was _General Hospital_ called _General Hospital_ if it was basically about the mob?

They rotated, Sharon and my mother and Kerry and Hunter, her girls, Dawn, Stacey. Erin and Jeremy came up for two days, painting Mary Anne's nails a rich rose color and combing what was left of her hair. She was sleeping but not, her eyes blinking when the needles were plugged into her catheter to give her chemo, when the doctors examined her. Her copper-colored eyes would follow people around the room, but she would faze out and droop into rest again, the drugs keeping her calm and quiet as her body healed.

She flinched hard, though, when the OB came to examine her, her sleep-stilled face wincing when unknown hands slid between her legs. The doctor looked at me at the end of the examination with a broad smile on her face. I thought of Dr. Chaplin back at Duke—I liked her a lot. I trusted her. When could we go home?

"Everything looks wonderful," she beamed, tossing her rubber gloves into the waste bin. "Baby is growing normally, heartbeat is nice and strong—and the baby was never deprived of oxygen, since your wife was already getting care when she had the embolism. If there was a best case scenario for a woman to be sick like she is? Your wife hit the jackpot. Really, Mr. Baker, you two are very, _very_ lucky."

Mr. Baker. I bit back a wry grin and nodded. "The baby is really, truly healthy?"

"Really and truly. Relax, Dad, it's going fine," the doctor smiled, reaching over to rub my shoulder. Dad. _Dad_. Holy hell on earth, I was going to be a dad.

I let out a relieved laugh and rubbed my face, scratching at my bare head. "Thanks," I said, shaking her hand. Dad. That was my name now, too. Logan, husband, angel, _dad_. I liked the sound of it. No. I loved it.

But I loved the other names, too. Because I heard them from her.

After the doctor left, I sat down on the edge of Mary Anne's bed and took her limp hand in mine, smiling as she gave it a tiny squeeze. She was waking up from wherever she was waiting. She was coming back. I reached out and rubbed her swollen belly. "Hey, Tess," I whispered. "Did you hear all that? The baby's doing great. The baby's just fine. So now it's your turn, okay?"

Mary Anne exhaled, and I pressed my lips together, about to say more, when I felt a stir under my hand. The hand that was on her stomach. Like the rumble of a snare drum head when it's struck. Like feet on skin.

I stared down at my hand as my mouth dropped open. "Holy shit," I breathed, pressing harder against the rise of her belly. I began to laugh, leaning down to put my head on her abdomen, and I could feel the kicks on my cheek. Strong, persistent kicks. "Hey," I called into her skin. "Hey, baby. It's—your dad. Hey, there, buddy. It's been one hell of a ride, huh?" I paused, stroking my thumb over Mary Anne's stomach. "Hi, it's Dad. This is your daddy."

And I felt the beat of the kicks under my hand, under my face, and there was another touch, on my other cheek. When I opened my eyes, I saw: a hand.

Her hand.

And Mary Anne was watching me as she ran a thumb under my crying eyes.

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It took me an hour to tell her everything that had happened while she was sleeping and not-sleeping though not awake, and as I spoke, her voice climbed back to life. She would laugh and gasp, and as she sucked on ice cubes, she could say things like, _You totally smacked them all down!_ And, _Dad looked miserable_?

Yes, yes he did, _tesorina_.

But it doesn't mean that we can forgive. Not yet. We will wait until November.

"So, that's everything," she said in a scratchy voice.

I hesitated. "Not—everything, one last thing has to happen, but that's not for…another twenty minutes. How about you and me watch _The Price is Right_, huh? God, I just don't get Plinko. Everybody loves that game, but no one can ever win it, it's such horseshit," I mumbled, switching on the TV and curling up beside her on the bed. I wanted to hear her story, of being with Barbara, but I knew: this wasn't the time. Not yet. One day. And I had to think of a way to thank Babs for helping Mary Anne back.

There was a knock at the door, and Stacey came in. "Hey—Sharon said that you two wanted some alone time—but…you texted me?" she said, holding up her phone as Dawn trailed in behind her.

Mary Anne looked at me with questioning eyes, and I just kissed her. _Trust me_, my lips said, and she wrote into my back, _Always_. I glanced over my shoulder at them. "Pop a squat on the cot. Stace, it's your favorite game show—the free market system in action."

"Oh, amen," Stacey laughed, flopping on the flimsy bed. She and Dawn sat close to each other, and when Dawn rested her head on Staey's shoulder, looking at Mary Anne in naked relief, Stacey rubbed her back. A peace in our times. Two sets of sisters in one room.

Mary Anne smiled at them, and then whispered in my ear, "So that's the last thing? That they're back to normal?"

"Well, they made up once Stacey and I got back to the hospital, but no, that's not it," I whispered back. "Just wait."

We watched a few pricing games, Stacey screaming at the television about California inflation, until there was another knock on the door.

Dawn frowned. "Chemo time?" she asked, glancing at Mary Anne and then reaching for a plastic basin.

"No, not for an hour," Mary Anne rasped, struggling to sit upright, as the door flew open.

"'For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate," Davis recited in a loud voice, the door slamming open. His stained and dirt-smeared clothes stank of mud and sweat, even from here, and I suddenly felt amazingly sorry for the people who had to be in the airplane with him for the twenty-hour flight from Africa. I think I would have tried to jump out of the damn jet.

"Gospel of Luke, very nice," I laughed as Mary Anne gasped in excitement. I glanced over at Dawn and Stacey, both frozen as he came into the room.

He dropped his bags and shut the door. "It took me a damn week to get out of the Sudan, but when my brother calls me, I get my ass in gear." He strode across the room and cradled Mary Anne's face in his large, coffee-colored hands, kissing her cheek gently. "Welcome back, May."

She blinked in surprise as he leaned over to give me an awkward hug; I breathed through my mouth. Whoa, nasty. He looked past me, though, and saw her, and he glowed like a candle. "Anastasia," he said softly.

"Dave," Stacey whispered, getting to her shaking feet. She hesitantly walked to the other side of the room, staring at him. "Hi."

He paused, and then reached forward and touched her hair, then her hips, pulling her up and kissing her. "That's how you say hi," he told her, resting his forehead against hers.

"I—I—" she stammered, holding his face in her hands. "I thought you had a girlfriend."

"Yeah. And her name is _Anastasia_," he replied, kissing her again. Stacey let out a small gulp of tears and tossed her arms around his neck as Dawn clapped her hands together.

Mary Anne glanced at me, her eyes bright with delight. "Now, this? Was worth waking up for," she whispered.

"The only reason?" I asked, tipping her chin up towards me.

One hand snaked behind my head, urging me towards her lips. The other took my wrist and guided my own hand to her belly, where the baby was fluttering happily under my wife's skin. "A very good reason," she whispered, and as I breathed in the scent of cinnamon that lifted from her mouth, I could feel myself going home.

I held her belly tight under my hand. November. It was coming.


	32. Chapter 29: Mary Anne

There is one immutable truth to the universe: nothing goes with chemo better than a soap opera.

I could measure my treatments against what was on TV. Sami and Lucas mean the oral round. When the Spencers and Quartermaines were tearing it up, that's when the Tamoxifen was administered. IV drips during _Young and the Restless_, a title I never understood because most of the cast seemed pretty un-young; Nikki could Botox all she wanted, the lady was clearly on the elderly side of 30. When you were puking and miserable, the outsized characters on the screen with their horrific litany of problems were comical and reassuring. They were fictional, but when your husband is sleeping with your sister and trying to get all of the shares of your cosmetics company to ruin you, and then you fall into a coma, wake up, and fall in love with your bitter enemy?

It could almost beat cancer.

You have to make your own fun in a hospital.

By the time I had gotten reacquainted with all of my old friends on daytime television, I heard the words I had been so desperate to hear: _You can go home_. My heart, this shaky, tired thing, was strong enough to let me move southward. My body was strong enough to let me walk along the corridors without clutching to Logan's body or leaning hard on the IV stand. I was moving so I could move, shifting the treatments back down to the place that I ached for with every inch of my bones.

I could go home and leave Stoneybrook behind.

I had done that years ago. I was ready to do it again.

Eddie sat with his feet propped up on my bed and popped a few peanut butter MnM's into his mouth, watching me make lists of everything that we had to do before Logan and I could go home. Get plane tickets. Arrange for someone to get his car to Chapel Hill. Say goodbye to his family, to Sharon and Jeff—to Eddie himself. I kept hoping that somehow, magically, Dr. Paves would walk in the door, a sixth sense of hers tingling down her spine as she stood on some mountain in Peru, and she would drop her walking stick and know to come here. But that's not how the world works.

Unless you're Ry Schillabar.

"So, what's the plan, Stan?" Eddie asked, leaning back in his chair.

I ran my finger down the list, all of the words that I had put together to give order to this mess that had become my life. If I could write it all down, order it all together, sew it up straight, would things stop being so insane? My head was swirling with all of the _what ifs_. I could go home, but it wasn't a blanket that I could wrap around myself to keep all of the bad at bay. I could go home, but I still had cancer. I could go home, but I still had a baby that might be sick, might be crippled with bad genes, might be such a strain on my body that what had happened two weeks ago could happen again. I could stand behind my husband, I could lock our front door and hide under the soft covers of our bed, but it would all still be waiting for me.

There was a sickness, insidious and strong, and it nestled in my body and clung like a jealous lover. I had a fight that was not over.

Taking in a breath, I looked at him. "I feel okay—in my head," I began slowly. "I'm tired, and I'm achy as hell, but I feel okay, Eddie. I know I can handle it, and I know that when I feel like I can't, I have hands that I can hold."

"Good," he smiled, nodding a few times. He tilted his head at me. "One of the things, though, is understanding the difference between taking a hand and letting it smother you. You need to make sure that you've got boundaries, you know."

"Dawn and Stacey are getting an apartment across the street—I like my soap operas _there_," I said, pointing at the television. "Though…things seem to be back to normal now. Dawn has been calling Henry every night, this whole week, Stacey and Davis have been inseperable—maybe it's all over."

"That's great, and I hope that it stays that way, but don't let your optimism cloud your own needs, kid," Eddie said, raising his eyebrow at me. "Your resolution to fix Stacey…Stacey needed to fix herself. Dawn needs to grow up, too. These are things that you have to let them do on their own, in their own space and time. And you?"

"Need to worry about me," I sighed, resting my hands on my quiet belly. The baby was still, maybe lulled into rest by the gentle swoop of my hands over my stomach as I sat through chemo. It was comforting, this rhythm, of rubbing its home. As if it were a crystal ball. Baby, baby, are you my match? Are you everything I've been dreaming of?

Did my mother do this, too? There were oranges on the air suddently, and I inhaled so deep, my toes curled. Mommy, I know you're here.

I took in a breath and looked at him. "I have an abortion schedule for next week," I whispered. "We get the amnio on Monday, and if I need it—Thursday. Because I _have_ to live, Eddie, and the baby…" When I closed my eyes, I could see the thrill on Logan's face whenever he rested his fingers and felt the kicks, the way he would hunch over and stare down at my skin as if there was a treasure buried in his _tesorina_ that he couldn't wait to discover. I could see him and me in our bed, a baby lying in my arms as I was cradled in his, its tiny finger semi-circling around my wedding ring as my husband and I whispered to this precious thing that was half me and half him.

Us, sitting on the couch and clapping in excitement as the baby tottered around the living room—a girl in a little green dress, the ribbons in her hair bouncing as she took four hesitant steps and then crashed back down to all fours.

Us, kneeling in the hallway of our house as we pulled her very first backpack over her shoulders and each kissed her small cheeks, each holding a hand of hers as we held hard to each other, promising her that school would be so much fun.

Us, us, us and our baby that would grow up and show that a life filled with joy is still something that can expand and get larger, somehow, as she builds in inches. Why did I think of the baby as a daughter? Because it was too hard to think of a son, to match the one that was lost.

_Please be a match_, my hands begged my belly. _Because I will take any reason, any, to keep you with us._

"May, you have to live," Eddie said quietly, taking my hand, pulling it from the place that my fingers wanted to orbit all day.

"I know," I said, and my voice shook like paper caught in wind. He pulled me to him for a hug, and I waited for Eddie to make a joke. For him to say something that would cut through this misery like a blade. But we only sat together in silence, as he rubbed my back, holding me as close at my stomach would allow.

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Sharon helped me into the wheelchair, and I reached up and took Logan's hand, lacing my fingers with his tightly as the orderly pushed me out of the room and down the hall. I had left the hospital in Stoneybrook only to immediately come to Duke Hospital, but somehow, the maze of corridors here felt more comfortable. Maybe because my school was a minute behind it. Maybe because my house was ten minutes away. My house, my things, my life. They were all here.

And they had kept me overnight, Dr. Wilks and Dr. Chaplin looking over my records and my body, scouring each inch until their faces relaxed in acceptance. An hour ago, they scrawled their names over papers that said that I could finally, finally go home. When Logan came to the room after his workout, I waved the discharge papers like a flag, and he picked me up in his arms, spinning me around the room while my stepmother smiled. Smiled at me like a mother would.

I grinned up at Logan and squeezed his hand as we slowly rolled to the elevators. "Sharon? Did you want to come back to the house with us? I think our great plans are, Take a nap," I laughed. In our own bed. The idea of it ran pink in my veins, and I kissed my husband's hand, right on his ring, and the metal taste ran a shiver down my tongue.

"As nice as the guest bed was to me last night, I think? I am in the great service of going shopping with Stacey and Dawnie," Sharon sighed. "Their apartment consists of two air mattresses and all of their bags, and Stacey is nearly silent with how appalling that is."

"She _does_ understand, she's only living there for a month?" Logan asked, pushing his glasses higher up his nose.

Sharon hesitated as we got into the elevator, glancing at the gangly-limbed orderly who was humming a badly out of tune rap song under his breath. "Well, this isn't exactly the place to bring this up to you two, but…I think Mary Anne knows, but Dawn hasn't been doing well in school. She enjoys the social aspect of college a lot more than her classes," she began slowly, glancing at her hands. "And her father is reluctant to pay thousands of dollars for her to be the campus queen, rather than get a good start on her future. And I want someone who can be around and be a caretaker for May in the fall. So—Jack and I discussed this, and he's willing to let Dawn take the semester off, work on her book, and be your helper," Sharon finished.

And I could hear a bitter echo of Dawn's voice: _And teach me responsibility._

Logan looked at me, one eyebrow sliding up. We had set ground rules with Dawn and Stacey about our house—the door was always open, except when it was not. If the living room curtains were pulled, take it as a signal to stay away. A more highly evolved form of the messaging system that Kristy and I used to do in our childhood, communicating without words between our houses. Dawn had so quickly agreed, I couldn't finish my sentence before she said hers: _I don't need to walk in on him naked again, thanks_.

"We walked in on you—in our own bed!" Logan had spluttered back, his face turning crimson with embarrassment, and Davis had laughed so hard, he fell off of the cot in the hospital room. My husband had groaned and hid his face in my neck, mumbling that he was glad Davis was going back to New York for two weeks.

"But then he'll be spending time with us," I teased, my voice crackling as I winked at Davis. "And there are oh so many stories to tell."

"Cracker, you badass," Davis gasped. "Or bare ass."

"Shut the fuck _up_!" Logan yelled, throwing a clean plastic basin at Davis. "Judge not lest ye be judged, Dave, because I have so walked in on you and Stace before."

"Yeah, but I'm hot," Davis shrugged.

Stacey nodded. "He is, sorry, Lee," as she curled against him like a shell, and there was a wave of heat from her happy eyes that made me feel like I was standing too close to a new star.

And now Stacey was a bundle of light, living across the street from us with plans to settle in—but really, settling Dawn in for a long stay, to settle in her sunshine before she left for Stanford. I looked at Logan and spoke at him with my eyes. _I'm okay with it_.

_I like the idea of someone there for you_. "I'm fine with it," he told Sharon.

"And let me say this—you two have full rights to tattle on her if she's not helping enough, okay?" Sharon warned as we exited the elevator and headed for the exit, for the heat of the North Carolina July that my skin ached for. "Writing her book, dating Henry, whatever she's doing to fill her time, her minutes are meant for you first. I want my daughters looking out for each other," she added, her voice tight and low and so full of the idea of us as a family, the image of my father being next to her hurt my eyes.

He had until November—would he take all of the minutes, too, to put himself back together?

As the humidity of the summer day hit my skin, I took in a sun-rich breath. Everything, everything was so alive out here, the too-bright green of the trees, the explosion of flowers in the perfectly made gardens. Durham was alive today, and so was I.

I held tighter to Logan's hand as I felt the baby stir and begin a drumbeat against my belly, and he leaned down to help me out of the chair, belting his arms around my body to hold me against him. I wondered if his hip could pick up the rhythm of feet, if it echoed inside of his body, then, too.

I smiled at Sharon as I stood with my husband. "That's how a family should be."

When we returned to the house, I walked slowly into each room, running my fingers over our couch, the neat piles of books and pens in the den, the posters with my husband's stern face, the photos in the living room of all of our friends. Pots and pans that hadn't been touched in weeks. J.D.'s food bowls, empty since Jeremy had been caring for her. Even the washing machine, the lid open, a single red sweater clinging to the sides. I sat on the guest bed, unmade from Sharon's sleep the night before, the room now devoid of any hint that Dawn and Stacey and Jeff had ever been in here.

I waved into my bed like it was the ocean, burying my face in the pillows on Logan's side, picking up the scent of his ginger shampoo and inhaling it deep, far past my lungs. Snuggled under the blue fleece blanket, I breathed in his scent from the fabrics, breathed in the mint of his mouth as he exhaled only an inch from me, his long body curled around mine.

"We're home," I murmured, weaving my fingers with his as I slipped into sleep.

"Home is wherever you are," he whispered in my ear, kissing the soft skin of my neck, and tucking his face there.

What if I die? You can't follow me. But I could feel it in the sturdiness of his frame, down to his solid bones, I could feel it like a kick under my own stomach: his belief. _No dying_. He would follow me down as if I had dove into a pool and pull me back. He believed it, that his faith could do it.

So I closed my eyes for sleep, and I believed it, too.

I woke to the soft light that promised that the sun was on its way down. Logan was gone—I had a clear view of the clock, blinking 8:40 at me. Holy Toledo, I sure knew how to waste a day.

"Angel?" I called out. "Sharon?"

"I'm here, just a sec," he said from the office below. "I'll get dinner. I just want to finish this chapter."

"It's summer, you goof, that means you get to rest now," I laughed, stretching my arms out in each direction of the bed.

"Myth," he snorted. "Summer is when the truly attentive get ahead."

I rolled my eyes and reached down to my purse, plucking out my teddy bear and settling J.B. next to me on the bed. I wondered when Jeremy would come back with my dog. I was ready to see her, stroke her stomach and tease my fingers by her snapping mouth. The bedroom door was open, and I could see into the guest room. No Sharon. She was leaving in a few days—and I would miss her, the calm of her. Yes, she had a butter dish in her purse today, but she would sit around with earphones on, listening to tapes to improve her memory, her face gritting with determination. She had improved herself slowly over these years, yet she was still relaxed, taking each challenge with a deep breath and a firmness that I admired.

Something a daughter would love to learn from her mother.

My mother never came, the week that I was sleeping. I could open my eyes and see Logan and Sharon and Dawn, Emily and Miranda, circling me with a blur as if they were the ghosts. But then I would shut my eyes and see my Babsie lying with me on the bed of my high school years, my bedroom in Stoneybrook. She would squeeze my hand and urge, _Rest a bit, and then make yourself go back to the door._ We would stay together, and then she would watch me shuffled to the hallway door, open it with aching arms and step into the brightness and the noise that waited behind it.

Until one time, the ghosts of my love, my family, my friends became real. And the real that was Barbara slipped back into the invisible place where she lived, now that she was dead.

Maybe my mother was afraid that if she was there, I would follow them back.

Logan walked into the room with a large tray full of food, a steaming plate with a chicken stir fry. I looked at the mound of peppers with greedy eyes and seized a fork the moment he set the food in front of me. "I have to say, the baby cancels out the usual chemo starvation," I grinned, stabbing a pepper and sliding it onto my tongue, waiting for the hot snap of it to fill my mouth. If you have to crave a food, let it be a good one.

I suddenly wanted peanut butter.

Okay. I looked down at my stomach and raised an eyebrow. You, baby, make for some strange wants.

Like the want to risk my life to keep you—no, that's not strange. That's just how a mother feels. Because I…I am your mother.

"That's good because I happen to love it when you are a bit more than just bone, thank you," Logan laughed, grabbing a plate of his own.

"Did you eat yet?" I asked, glancing at the clock. "Don't tell me you waited."

"Oh, hell no. Sharon came over and made all of this at six, and I had some then with her—what, you think I could make this?" he snorted. "She said that for you, she'd make meat. Then she grabbed a hunk of tofu and whispered sweet nothings to it, it was kinda wrong."

I giggled and held my hand in front of my mouth as I chewed. "Did she coo?"

"I thought I heard kissing. That's when I had to leave. When you make out with hunks of edible sponge, that's when you cross my line," he said, shaking his head.

"Oh, but making out with a piece of steak?" I prompted.

"Completely different," Logan nodded.

I gave him a little shove and leaned against him, his strong body solid like a tree. He set down his plate and lifted me into his lap, a hand brushing over the thinning hair on my head. I looked at his fingers, expecting to see my curls shredded between them like leaves, but they were empty, just reaching down for his fork again. I let my head rest on his shoulder and kissed the bend of his jaw, the sharp angle of it. He was all strength and sharpness on the outside, wasn't he. So gentle, so good underneath.

And strong, as strong as muscle and bone, if he just believed in himself. Believed like I did. It was so hard at times to remember the arrogance of him when we first dated, back in middle school. But that is being thirteen and a shadow of our parents. When we emerge, we become someone new. Hopefully someone better.

I was in the shadow of my dead mother. Let me come into the light.

"Where is Sharon, angel?" I asked, taking another bite.

I could hear him swallow, his free hand resting on the rise of my belly, palming it like a basketball. "She's with the girls, she said she'll be back around eleven. They're decorating and shit like that. Stace and Dawn are going to drive down to Charlotte and go to the IKEA tomorrow, and probably buy the whole damn place out. It's a one bedroom, but Stacey's acting like they have a mansion to fill, with the way she's planned and charted for it all."

"Good. I'm glad they're going. I was kinda afraid that tomorrow, they'd get all hovering and stuff. I want us to have a normal Sunday. No worrying about Monday," I said firmly, drawing my fork across the air in a line.

"Sharon wants to know if you want her to come along to the amnio. The Cali twins, too," he said slowly, pressing his hand against my skin. Was he willing the baby to speak? Could we translate its kicks like Braille, make a meaning from it?

"I want it to just be you and me," I whispered, turning my face to look at him. "Just you and me."

"Okay," Logan said, and relief bloomed in his eyes. "I really wanted it—to be private. I mean, I know they're family, but—"

I kissed him, letting my lips blanket his own. "Angel," I murmured, touching his face. "I know." I do. Because it's you and me, a sickness, and a want. It is.

"I love you," Logan whispered, leaning his forehead against mine, his hand moving up to cradle my face. It was so large, holding so much of my head there in that rubber-scented palm. "I love you, pretty girl."

"I love you, angel," I said as he kissed me. "I do." I take you, I do, my husband.

He kept his forehead against mine. "The rest of the summer, I'm all yours. I quit my job at the bar, and if I need money, I'm going to borrow from Mom and Dad. Money can be made later. Time with you, it can't. All I have to do is train, but otherwise, I am here."

"You're—you're going to let them help?" I blinked.

"Yeah. It's what parents do," he said simply. "Help their kids. And I need help, to be the best husband I can be for my wife. I'm going to take it."

I stared at him and wrapped my hand around his back. _I'm proud of you. You are so strong_, I wrote into his shirt.

_It was hard_, he wrote into my arm. _But. It's for you. I can do anything for you._

"Thursday," I exhaled, staring at his eyes, those summer bright eyes. "I know Sharon said she would stay that long, but if it happens, I want it to be you and me. I told the girls not to come, that if I needed them afterwards, I would say. I told Dawn and Stacey that they're not allowed to come across the street unless I say. Jeremy and Erin know to stay away. I know that I'll need space. Just you, but space. But—what do you need?" I urged, holding tight to his back.

Logan set down his fork and touched my belly with that hand. "I'd need to talk to my priesr, before. And after. Dave is coming on Wednesday, just for his visit. I'm gonna need him, I am. Shawn is the only guy on the team who knows about the baby still—I mean, not to be crude, but I know a couple of the guys have had girls who have…and I don't really want to hear from them," Logan said tightly, looking away. "But Shawn, he's—Shawn, you know? But I might need some time to decompress, go see him for a bit, too. Is that okay?"

"We'll make it work. I'd be okay with Dave coming over, if you needed to talk to him. Or—maybe just listen to him," I said. Maybe his belief in The Word would give Logan peace. Whatever he needs to get through that day and the days after. "But I know I'd want to just spent that day silent and with you. And Friday, too." I licked my lips. "How is your family doing with this?"

"They want you to live," Logan said, stroking my stomach. His eyes darted down to look at where his hand was. "There's one thing that my parents get that Richard doesn't—it's that we aren't _them_. Our pain, our lives, our choices, they might be similar, but they aren't the same. My mom knows that we have waited until the last possible moment to see if we can do this, but she knows that if we continued on when the baby is just for our own want to have one, you could die. And you're her child now," Logan added, his voice going thick like tar. "Children come first, above all other things to her. She wants her…daughter to live."

"Did she say that?" I asked, my voice tiny, awed in front of that idea. _Daughter_. I had two women so quick to call me that now.

"Yeah. She called you her daughter, and told me that we had to keep you alive, at any cost," Logan said. He breathed in, rubbing my stomach one more time before taking my face in his hands. "So that's what we're going to do. Keep you alive."

"Logan," I said slowly, putting my hands on his thighs. "About that. Me, alive. If something happened to me…and—I—Logan, don't keep me alive if there's no chance for me to come back. I don't want to live like that, just on a bed, some machine making me alive. I wouldn't be me, angel, I wouldn't want that."

He stared at me, his face stunned like he had been punched. "What?"

"I don't want to be on machines. Give me a chance to come back. I've never been…to a point where the doctors said that there was no hope. But if we ever got to that point—please, Logan, don't make me stay like that. I'll always come back to you if I can, but—please," I whispered, I begged. "If it's my time, I need you to speak for me."

"I would _never_ want to let you go," he said, his voice picking up a harsh edge, begging me back.

"But you might have to," I protested. "You might have to let me go, Logan. Someplace you can't follow."

He gazed at me, his eyes so bright with tears, it was hard to look at them, like staring directly into the sun. "If I promise to do that—then you have to swear, you have to _swear_ to me, Mary Anne, that you would fight like hell to stay. No going off gently into the good night—I want rage, okay? I want you to make Dylan Thomas look like a damn genius because he knew that you can fight death," he said, his voice low like the rumble of a coming train.

I took his left hand and brought it to my mouth, kissing the ring there, as his face began to swim through my tears. _I take you_. "I promise, I do."

He took my hand, too, and stroked my ring finger against his cheek before kissing the gold band, the metal glinting in the sunset light, shining like his eyes. I brushed away a tear from his cheek as he exhaled. "Then I promise, too."

When I kissed his lips, so slick with the salt water of his eyes, of my eyes, blurring together where we met, I could feel those promises heavy in our mouths. The heartbreak on his tongue. And a strange bitter pocket, sour like a lemon, that said that these words we had said would come back one day. That these words would reappear like a ghost.


	33. Chapter 30

Hey yall! Sorry this is a decade or so late. _Meant to Be_ revisions are kicking my tail—don't worry, those of you who volunteered to read, I'm nearly done with the first overhaul, and I seriously need input! Anyway, take care!

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It's the unremarkable days that I remember best: Barbara and I sitting on my bed as she taught me how to crochet, our feet bumping each other as we laughed too hard at some silly show on the television. Her hands, always so warm, reaching over to cover mine like mittens as she directed the hook around the yarn. _And under and pull—and, oh my God!_ she'd burst out, her eyes popping so wide as the character of the show stripped naked. When she laughed, her curls shook from root to tip. They tickled my nose.

Miranda frosting a cake extra thick. When she cut it, we could see the poof of three inches of the whipped blue icing rising like a pompadour off of the cake. _Shut up_, she snapped as the three of us exploded with laughter. She stuck her fingers into the sugar mush and licked greedily, giving us a superior expressing. _Tastes like awesome!_ And then she flicked some at me, then I chucked some at Emily, who picked up a piece and mashed it into Miranda's cheek. _Looks like awesome, too_, Emily cawed, and the three of us squealed and dug our hands deep into the cake, eating pinches and tosses them wildly at each other until Mr. Bernstein came into the kitchen and then promptly walked back out.

Dr. Paves, experimenting with butterscotch lifesavers in her coffee instead of Werther's Originals. _Does this taste the same? It tastes wimpy to me,_ she mused, smacking her lips and passing the cup to me. When I said no, she narrowed her eyes. _Try it again!_

_You just want me to agree with you._

_Well, naturally, I'm always right, got it?_ she said with a sly smile, popping a candy in her mouth and keeping it between her teeth, a coin of orange, before sucking it back—but too far, and as she gulped, she stared at me in horror. _I swallowed it!_

Eddie, passing the Slinky from hand to hand and then tossing it to me. I held onto one end, he held onto the other, and we peered into the stretched coil as if it were a telescope, his large brown eye staring at mine.

_Perspective_, he said to me. _That's what it's about. Seeing things from a different angle._ And he shook the coil, making the metal squeal a bit as it shimmied between our hands, his eyes still holding mine before winking once.

Kristy watching the clock, the hot sun beating against Claudia's windows; it is spring break but it feels like June. 5:26. Here comes Dawn, rushing in, her hair even whiter by days outside. Here comes Abby, loping like a puppy in her soccer cleats, Stacey trailing behind and laughing. There is Claudia, sketching something on a scrap of paper while Jessi stretches lazily on a small patch of carpet. 5:27. Logan said he was coming, so the carpet next to me is empty, waiting, his hand will skirt my lower back through the meeting. My pen is uncapped and ready above the record book. I think I hear Shannon through the open window. 5:28.

Dawn and Stacey, practicing dance moves from a music video. _To quote the great philosopher Shakira, "Hips don't lie," _Stacey announced, her body snaking around like a length of silk.

_Yeah, and my hips say, Girl, please, for the sake of humanity—and womanity—don't even try_, Dawn sighed, trying to swing her waist in the same way. _Bite me, Shakira. _

Stacey rolled her eyes and stepped closer to Dawn, putting her hands on the other girl's hips and gently leading her in the dance steps. And you could see it click in Dawn, her face brightening, her body loosening and finding the moves. Stacey beamed, slapping Dawn's butt and calling out, _Aw aw, sexy bitches, aw aw, put your hands in the air!_

And Dawn spinning around and making her still-long hair fly in the air as she began dancing the Cabbage Patch while Stacey did the running man, the two of them making up a song as they wildly tumbled around Dawn's room, becoming breathless with motion, their eyes shining so hard, it was like catching sunlight on a mirror.

My father working in his office, bent low over a case, the lamp on the desk the only light in the dim room. Sharon coming in with a steaming cup of coffee and kissing the clean skin on the top of Dad's head, rubbing his shoulders as Dad looked at her gratefully, as though no one in the world had ever been so kind as her. And in the way his eyes traced over her, I could see my reedy father, young and focused with a full head of hair and unscarred eyes, and Sharon was the Homecoming Queen who looked over her football captain King's shoulder to find the quiet, smart boy she truly loved in the shadowed circle of students watching her dance. I held my breath as I watched the two of them in that moment: I stored it tight in my heart to remember, This is what it looks like, to have found the one you want.

Logan pushing his glasses up his nose as we studied side by side on the couch in my living room, our math notes spread in a rainbow over the coffeetable. He chewed on the end of his pencil and made notes directly on the page of his books in his careful square handwriting. When he yawned, I could hear a click in the back of his jaw.

_Can I go back in time and just kill the guy who invented calc? Really. The fact that he's already dead sucks. I really want him to suffer_, he mumbled, closing his eyes for a moment as he slumped back. I rubbed his knee, letting my hand linger on his thigh as I continued with a problem; when I finished, I looked over at him, and he was asleep, head bowed on his chest, his glasses slipping back down again. I slid them off of his face, folding them neatly on top of the book, and I gently lowed my Logan down, letting him rest. I covered him in a blanket—two, since he was too long for just one, his bare feet sticking out, cold and awkward—and traced the bones in his face, watching his lips curl up in sleep at the feel of my skin on his.

I woke up this morning and plunged myself deep into these ordinary memories. Homework and dance steps and sleepovers and breakfast mornings and putting on makeup and holding hands and crowding together to watch a movie and dinners around the table and dinners eaten at desks and everything everything that it meant to be alive and normal and functioning and not under the weight of a nightmare.

My hands floated down and cradled the bulge of my belly, and I glanced at the clock. Four more hours, then the doctor. Three more hours, and we'll know. What we can keep and what we can carry. I shut my eyes tight and chanted like a prayer to ward off evil, _Knitting scarves for Dawn, therapy, walking my dog with Barbara, talking with Em on IM, tanning with Miranda, borrowing Stacey's nail polish and hinting for her to give me a manicure and getting one, borrowing a book from Jeremy, stealing a sip from Erin's cup, finding Sharon's keys in the fridge, doing the dishes for Dad before he asks. _

No cancer. No lost babies. No death.

Just minutes and minutes that fill up days.

_5:29. 5:30._

I want them all. I held tight to my stomach: I want them for _you_.

Stay. Stay.

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"Thanks, Sharon," Logan said, putting his fork on the plate, his legs crossing underneath the dining room table and knocking my knee. "This was delicious."

"Everybody needs a good breakfast on a big day," Sharon said with a firm nod, though her hands were fluttering like caged birds. She stared at my own plate and heaped it full again, pancakes and sausage. Eggs. Granola. "You need to keep your strength up, sweetheart, you have chemo tomorrow."

I have the amnio results today, Sharon, that's why you are acting like Betty Crocker's cracked out twin. I bit that back, though, and took in a breath. "I don't know if I can eat this much," I told her carefully.

"I'll help," Stacey said brightly, reaching over and spearing a sausage. "How much did it suck to make the sausage, Sharon?"

"I'm trying to not think about where it comes from," she sighed, giving Stacey a grin.

"From the sausage tree. They are native to Oregon," Dawn nodded, snatching some of my granola. Logan took one of the pancakes, winking at me, as he blanketed it in syrup. I speared a pepper out of the pile of eggs and sank into the spice of it. It made my mouth warm, it seemed to travel down the length of my body. They said that in pregnancy, your cravings change. No. Since day one, I have been craving bell peppers. Yellow and red and the bright happy orange. The Bible says, Comfort me with apples—but cover me in peppers.

No Mary Anorexic this time. I looked down at my belly—thank you for that, I thought, rubbing it once. You are meant to save me. Match baby, match baby.

I took another bite. "Right, sausage trees are a close cousin of the southwestern hot dog tree. Emmy sees them all the time in Arizona," I nodded.

Dawn giggled. Normal normal, we are normal here. "Speaking of hot dogs, I was thinking we could have a cookout? Before Stacey goes? Like we had at the beginning of the summer. Henry says that he has the most killer recipe for a vegetable kebob," she said, popping granola in her mouth.

Logan narrowed his eyes. "Like we had at the beginning? That was a—" His eyes landed on Sharon, and he straightened up. "—a very calm, quiet gathering, right."

Sharon tossed her napkin at him. "Please. I know you all very well. It was a raging kegger," she laughed. "And I think it's up to Mary Anne—she'll need to get as much rest as she can, with school and chemo—" And. And. Say it, Sharon, why are we all acting like the baby's already gone?

"And the baby," I added stubbornly, suddenly, and every back at the table went stiff. "Being pregnant is tough, too."

"Yes, that, too," Sharon added, her voice thinning. Her hand touched my wrist. "I'm sorry," she whispered, and I bowed my head, biting on my lip until the tissue crackled under my teeth.

"I'm sorry, Sharon—but—I have to," I said, moving my arm so that our hands joined. I held so tight to her, until I could feel the blood pulsing in her veins. Logan's hand started tracing words into my thigh—_I love you, I love you, I believe_—and I could see Stacey put her hand on his shoulder. And Dawn reach out to touch her mother as her eyes met mine. We were linked, clinging together, as if four people could will the monsters away. We are light.

I took in a breath. "Um. Speaking of school. I'm—I'm going to take the semester off," I announced, watching Sharon. "I know we had talked, about just going down to part time, one class, but—I need to rest up. My lab work looks really good, they said so, I might be able to move to the lightest chemo by the end of the month," I said, and that finger on my thigh kept curling. _Yes. I love you. _"This is my number one priority. It has to be."

"I think that's a good idea," Stacey said quickly. "Really. I know you think you're some kind of superwoman, but—check it at the door. Besides, now? You can start watching _Days of Our Lives_. Oh, that evil Stefano," she spat, shaking her fist. "I have a class scheduled over it, so I'll be calling you to find out what's happening with Belle and Shawn."

"Glad I can help," I said dryly.

"I like to think the whole world works for me," Stacey said dreamily, breaking off a bit of muffin and giving me an arched smile. "It's a macro system. I supply the awesome—which is me, natch—and in return, I demand obedience. Economics! It's the chi of life."

"I'm glad you have such a good understanding of the operation of the world," Logan said, reaching over to rip a piece off of the muffin.

She slapped his hand hard. "Getcher hands off my muffin!"

"Uh, gladly," he snapped, whisking his hand away.

"That crossed a line," I laughed, covering my mouth.

"That crossed _several_ lines," Dawn shuddered.

Sharon stared at us all, her eyes darting around as if she were witnessing a wild tennis match. "Um—what am I missing?"

"The joys of double entendre," Dawn mumbled, still waving her hands as if warding off the urge to puke.

Stacey leaned forward on her elbows, waving the muffin at Logan. "I always _knew_ you wanted a piece. But I thought you would have preferred it buttered—"

"Okay, that's it," he burst out, leaping to his feet. "I'm going for a quick run."

"Oh, Lee, it could have been worse—Stacey could have said you wanted something from the hot dog tree," Dawn said innocently, her eyes wide and angelic.

I couldn't help it—husband or not, I exploded with laughter. The baby twisted inside of me, as if it were disrupted by this violent shake of happiness. Stacey started gasping through her giggles while Dawn smirked, taking a chomp out of a piece of sausage.

"You! Are supposed to be on my side! We took vows!" Logan accused, pointing at me.

"I'm sorry, but—that was pretty awesome," I laughed, squealing as he hugged me from behind, burying a growl of a kiss on my neck.

"I quit, I'll see y'all later. _Maybe_," he added, glaring at Dawn again before heading out to the backyard to retrieve J.D.

I looked at Dawn and tossed a bit of granola at her. "You? Are so evil to him."

Sharon threw up her hands. "I still don't get what the muffin is!"

Stacey cackled, taking another bite. She calmed down and looked over at me. "Are you sure that you two don't want any company? Like—we can drive you, we can sit in the waiting room…?"

"We haven't changed our minds," I said firmly, my eyes traveling between the three of them. "We want to be alone. If it's good, we'll let you know. If it's bad…we'll let you know." I cleared my throat. "Though—there is something that you can do for me."

"Name it," Stacey said, and Dawn leaned forward, her eyes hooking into mine.

I held up my hands. "Can I get a manicure? Just because you're fighting cancer—"

"Doesn't mean you can't be fabulous," Stacey finished, beaming at me. "Mani and pedi time, for reals. Let me run back to the apartment and get the tools. I'm thinking…something in the…'fuck me red' family of shades," she announced, getting up from the table.

"I'll prepare the warm footbath," Dawn declared.

"Team Beauty," Stacey said, holding her hands for a high five.

"Always," Dawn agreed. I listened to the sounds of Stacey running out the front door, Dawn running upstairs and smiled, the heat of all of this happiness making my skin warm. I felt full again. The baby kicked, and I squeezed my belly back. Hello, baby. Maybe. Yes.

It has to be. _Stay_.

"You have just made their day," Sharon laughed, leaning her elbows on the table. "I know they have been—they wanted to help today, so bad. Do something."

Eggs and pancakes and sausage and muffins and toast—yes. Help comes in so many ways. I smiled at her, too, this woman who mothers me. "I know. Just—I know when I need to ask for help, but I also know that sometimes, I get really overwhelmed, and then I don't listen to myself first. I have to make sure that I can hear myself and Logan." I looked down at my half-full plate. "I'm sorry if that hurts you, Sharon. You are—"

"I don't need you to tell me that you're grateful. Mothers just do these things," she said, lifting up my chin. But fathers should, too. Dad? What are you thinking. Where are you. Do you think of me? "Of course I want to stay, I want to quit my job and move down here and be with you every day, I want to put you on the plane with me and take you home to Stoneybrook and make you all better just because I'm loving you every minute. As if that would heal you," she added, her voice so sad, it was tangible. "My daughter is hurting, I want to turn the world upside down to make it stop."

My eyes burned hard, and I waited for tears to come. Water for the firegirl. "I'm going to be okay, Sharon." If you say it, it might be true. It might be you. "I'm going to be okay, I am, I am. And Logan and the baby and I are going to be just fine, and I'm going to be cured," I said desperately.

"And then you'll live happily ever after?" Sharon whispered, holding my face in her hands. "Oh, sweetheart."

"I don't need happily ever after," I cried, pulling her to me, and I could smell oranges winding in the air, tying me to this woman. My mother was binding us. A benediction. A blessing. "I just want to live."

Sharon pulled me into her lap, my body a mess of new curves and radiation-burned, chemo-scaled skin. Her hand brushed over the rise of my stomach, and she cradled me tight, and when I closed my eyes and saw my mother's face smiling at me, my mother rocking baby me in a white chair, I knew—this is what it was like.

It felt the same.

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"Your nails are thinning again," Stacey sighed, peering at my toenails. "You know, for as much as cancer therapy has evolved since your first rodeo? Way too many things are familiar."

I looked at her and nodded, my breath skipping at bit at the clearness in Stacey's eyes. The way you could see deep down in them, a blue tunnel that was lit from someplace inside. No steel, no walls: just Stacey.

I gasped. "Why, Anastacia McGill, you're in _love_."

"Isn't it disgusting?" Dawn snorted.

"Says the one who is embracing monogamy. Who is in love _herself_," Stacey shot back, tossing the emory board at Dawn's head.

She tossed it back. "Yeah, but—please. Welcome to the real world, where people don't find the love of their lives the first go-around. _May._"

"Hey! Leave me out of this!" I squealed, wincing as Stacey filed at my thumbnail. "And, for the record? The Logan I married is a lot different than my first love Logan. The difference between the little boy and the man?"

"The difference between being a controlling dick and a neurotic perfectionist," Dawn mumbled. I glared at her, and she quickly added, "Kidding! Have Lee and I got into it at _all_ lately? That was coming from a place of begrudging affection for my dear brother-in-law. Come on. But you can't argue that he more than a little douchey in middle school."

"He had a not so fresh personality," Stacey snickered. She took another finger, scraping it against the board with deft strokes. "Actually? I'm happy to be getting into this adult groove. I don't know, maybe it was just our age, but some months I felt like one person, the next, someone entirely different back then. Fighting my bitchy side. It was hard to figure out who I was. Fucking hormones."

"Speak for yourself. I love who I was, I'm staying her. I'm awesome," Dawn said firmly, painting one toenail a hard, bold red.

I held up my hand. "Actually? I'm kinda okay with growing past the whole 'Crying because the day ends in Y' thing."

"Yeah, and it just took ten thousand dollars of therapy to get you there," Dawn said breezily, and I kicked some water at her. Bitch.

Truthful. But—_bitch_.

"Anyway!" Dawn wiped the water off her face, glaring at me. "The big difference is, I—love Henry," she admitted, bobbing her head a bit, "but—I am _not_ ready to think about settling down. It's nice that I'll be here for a while, taking care of you, May? So I can see him? But—if I had to go back to NoCal, I'd be really really sad, but not brokenhearted. I'm _not_ ready to settle down, I can't even fathom marriage or anything, I'm not ready. I'm not ten miles within ready." She painted another toe and shrugged. "I mean, this is a huge deal for me, to be monogamous. To be okay with not having sex because this is something more. But—there's so much I want to do with my life, and I can't do it weighted down by…_this_," she said, waving her hand as she looked around the room.

"What is—_this_?" I repeated, putting my free hand over my stomach. The baby kicked under my ring finger. _This_ finger. _This_ baby.

"You know—a husband, a kid, a house—admittedly a rental, but—I want to go to Thailand, I want to…join the Peace Corp, do environmental work in India—I want to do everything and anything—which is probably why college is kinda hard for me, I just want to do everything, right? And _this_, that you and Logan have, it work for you two." She smiled at me, my sister's smile, and she rubbed the sole of my foot with her thumbs. "You two are better married—you're like the fucking Wonder Twins. You're the bucket of water, he's…forming not that bad of a guy," she grinned. "But for me? This would weigh me down. This isn't what I want—not now. Maybe not ever, I don't know. And, honestly, do I have to know? I'm only twenty," Dawn finished, rolling her eyes.

Stacey's eyes were picking up a gold color, deeper than her hair. I looked over at her, peering carefully. "But you're thinking about it. Stacey's in loooove!" I sang.

"Shut up, or I'll nip your cuticles," she growled, snapping the clippers. Her face stayed gentle as she shrugged, reaching for my other hand. She caught my eye as she set the first hand down on my stomach, squeezing both my hand and my bump for a brief second. Oh, _Stacey_.

Welcome back.

My eyes welled hard with tears, and she glared at me, trying to keep the smile out of her eyes, that sweet wave of her heart. "Sop it up, May, for reals. You are _so_ pregnant," she sighed. "Hormones indeed."

No, it's you.

_I will save Stacey._

I forgot: the only person you can save is yourself.

"Dave and I are…talking—we're just talking, Jesus Christ and the Beatles, Dawn," she snapped, thrusting the emery board in my sister's face. "About getting married. If we can make the logistics work. He's tossing around the idea of playing over in Russia or Europe or something for a year, and then he and I try to go to the same grad school—you know, so we're starting at the same time. I have a top ten, he has a top ten, a few overlap? And…we'll see. Hopefully, it all works. Maybe it won't. But—I…want to try," she said slowly, holding a deep breath in her lungs, getting go a hard weight on her heart.

"And if it doesn't work, we'll be there for you, take care of you. And you'll _let us. _We'll have a post-breakup montage, like in the movies," Dawn said confidently.

"I know, but in movies, when girls are healing after a really horrible breakup, they always eat candy and ice cream. I can't do that," Stacey grumbled.

"Why not? Do you have diabetes? Why I didn't know," Dawn said innocently, and she yelped at Stacey tackled her, the two of them screaming with laughter as they dug fingers deep in each other's ticklish areas, the kind of things you know about your very best friend, someone you know as well as your own blood.

Miranda: the neck, the bottom of her left foot.

Emily: her armpits, behind her knees.

Barbara: her stomach, behind her knees.

Logan: under the small of his back, his waist, the inside of his upper left thigh.

"I'm so happy you two are okay," I murmured, watching the two of them wriggle like puppies, muttering threats and giggling too hard in the middle of them.

"To love is to trust, I had to learn that," Stacey said, putting her arms around Dawn.

"Yeah, you closed off bitch," she grinned, kissing Stacey's cheek noisily. "And this secret-keeping bossypants should probably learn self control."

"One day. Not yet, you're only twenty," Stacey teased, kissing Dawn's cheek back.

I'm only nineteen. I'll see twenty. I will.

"You know, right now, we're all okay," I said slowly, watching the two of them, encircled in each other's arms and a tight band of content. "Everything might come crashing down in a few hours, but right now—right this second, we're just…perfectly okay, aren't we."

Dawn's eyes pooled with tears, and Stacey held her tighter. My sister reached for my unpainted hand, lacing our fingers together, binding them. "Yeah, sis. We are." She rested our hands above my baby, the drumbeat of its kick. "We are."

This is the real magic—being normal.

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Logan took a long drink of the Wally Juice, pointing at a green dress with white flowers spiraling over the fabric. "That one. Wear that. I love that one."

"You love my legs in that one," I said, wiggling my eyebrows.

"I've been trying to pass a law, that you should be pantsless at home so I can stare freely? But it's been held up in the Senate." He shook the juice in the air. "Damn those Washington fat cats!"

"I'm all for political progress—viva la revolution," I gleamed, pulling off my yoga pants and tossing them to the ground.

He laughed, wrapping her arms around my thighs; his hands slid down to my knees, tracing the scaly skin, so dry and red from treatments. But he saw through it. He only saw me. "Viva, viva," he grinned. He rested his head on the ledge of my belly. "She's kicking."

"She?" I whispered, putting my hands on his neck, running my fingertips over the tiny hairs, the color of sand.

He pushed my tank top off of my stomach, settling his head back down on my bare skin. "Maybe I'm being silly, but—I guess I just thought that…there's someone looking out for this baby, more than your mom and Babs. A big brother," he admitted, speaking down into my stomach, but his eyes were on my own, those beautiful blue pools that I could swim in all day. "'Cause I'm a big brother, and I'd do everything in my power to take care of my siblings."

I once offered, I _begged_ to die for my sister. I died, I did. Not for her, but I wanted to. I knew how it could be.

I stared at the bottle of Wally Juice. Between ghosts and magic…where did Ry fit in? What was her part in it all. I knew it as certainly as my own name: she had more for us, this girl with dreams and potions. But why. That girl.

No. I felt Logan kiss my stomach. _This_ girl.

"I'd love it if it—she—was a girl," I said, stroking the circle of his scalp. "But I—"

"Just want this baby," he finished. "Yeah." Logan looked up at me. "And I want you, my pretty girl."

"I want you, too, angel," I said, exploring every inch of his shorn head with my fingers. "I love you, I love you." With a deep breath, I added, "And I want something _from_ you right now."

Logan lifted his head, looking at me, his eyes a mix of confusion, of need, of longing, of that red-dipped want that made my knees turn to water and my heart skip. Of love and fear and desperation and certainty. "Anything, Mary Anne."

I lifted one hand and touched my hair. My thinning, disappearing hair. "I don't want to watch it disappear. I won't be a victim. I want it gone by _my_ choice." I traced a heart on the top of his head. "You said to me, you shaved your head because that way, nobody tries to pull at it—Mr. Warrior, Mr. General, you go out ready for a damn fight, and that starts right here," I said, tapping his skin. "You and me, we're in a big ass fight, and I think it's time I got the head for it."

He rested his chin on my bulge and smiled. "If that's what you want?"

"Are you kidding? Allison sent me a huge box full of Pucci scarves, I'm ready to be the most fashionably beheaded cancer case in all of Duke Hospital," I breezed, taking his hand. "Hair grows back. And Babsie will make it curly again." The air became flush with strawberries, and I beamed. "I wouldn't mind it being red, too, Babs."

"Oh, I would," he said quickly, glancing around. "I loved your hair, Miss Babs, but, come on, the dark hair makes your girl look like a movie star."

I gave him a small shove. "I do not look like Anne Hathaway! All of you are insane. But, okay, Babsie, listen to Logan, he's the one who runs his fingers through it, he can pick the color."

His smile faded a bit, his eyes serene as they swept the room. "It smells like…strawberries," he whispered.

"Her shampoo," I breathed, closing my eyes and smiling, breathing it deep, willing it into every inch of me. I could remember her, being with her as I slept and not slept. My Barbara, my Babsie, she wants me alive. Here, with my husband, my angel, I had another angel flying by.

Two of them, I thought, remembering breakfast. Mom. I miss you.

But I don't want to be with you.

"Hi, Babs," Logan said in small voice. Something thickened in his throat, and he wiped hard at his eyes. "Babs…thank you."

I felt full, red and strong. Ripe. "Thank you, Babsie," I said. "Can you stay with us? Today? Can you stay?"

The window was shut; we were running the air conditioner to combat the thick hand of humidity that had descended here in the height of the summer. But it crept up an inch, the wood squeaking painfully as it moved. "Tess," Logan said hoarsely, rising to his feet and stepping between the window and me, his arm jutting out like a barricade. "What's going on."

My mother used to come. She would sit in the bathtub, she would lurk in mirrors, she would talk to me in my dreams. A ghost is as real as your own breath. For years, Mom tried to tell me things…I never listened. I didn't know how.

"It's okay," I said, moving beside him as a wind snaked into the room. It knocked over books, the pages winged and furious. Our clothes rolled across the wood floor like tumbleweeds, cartwheeling against the walls. I watched the bed sheets dance, the blankets flap—and my teddy bear, J.B., stay still and calm throughout it all. Our wedding photo and a picture of my girls and me from our trip to New York our senior year, the only things standing on a bedside table.

The Wally Juice didn't move.

I snuck my hand into his and held tight. "She's saying yes."

The wind stopped. Logan swallowed hard, pulling me against his body. "She could have just knocked twice for yes or something," he said, and I could feel the effort in his voice to keep it lifted light and easy.

"Come on," I said, brushing my other hand over his face, his tanned skin looking pale and green. "We have a head to shave."

"Can we ask her if we're going to get good news or bad?" Logan asked, staring at the window; he braced his body as if waiting for it to slam shut, for something to knock him over. For me to drop dead.

I shook my head. "Angel, we can't ask Barbara that. If she knows…and it's bad…you know it's breaking her heart. I want her to be at peace. I love you, Babs, it's okay," I said, glancing around again. "No matter what. I'm just glad to have you here." Once, Logan had said that having the ghosts wasn't a good omen or a bad one—it meant I was loved that much. I am loved that much that they battle back.

Just like I have, too.

I led him into the bathroom, and Logan silently pulled out his clippers and a razor blade. "Hey—Mr. Baker?" I joked, tickling his leg as I sat in wait on the toilet. "Are you okay?"

He sighed, plugging in the shears and looking down at me. "I just…remember the first time I ever saw a ghost. It was you—or—kinda you," he said, biting at the inside of his mouth. "The night that we first—or, you know, the night you had the heart attack," he corrected.

I roped my arms around his solid thigh. "I'd rather think of it as The Night That We First…, if you don't mind."

"I didn't want to be a total guy about it," he said, a smile finally passing over his mouth. "I mean, the second thing that pops in my head is carrying you in my arms…watching you on that table…all of it, all of that. But, yeah, the first thing I think about is you and me on the blue blanket in the midst of the messiest apartment in all of New Haven," he said, tucking back a curl of my hair. Something shadowed his eyes, though, and he gave his head a slight shake. "You were…so pale, not sparkling but not solid, either. Not made of stars, but I felt like I was looking up at the sky when I saw you. And it was like…someone was pressing an ice cube to my heart the moment I saw your eyes."

"You told me to run. I didn't know what to do, but you told me to run," I breathed. I jumped a bit at the buzz of the shears, pulling the towel tighter around my shoulders.

Ghosts. Logan's nickname was Ghost once. He was so quiet, so focused, he disappeared. But no. Ghosts could be so real.

For a moment, there was only the growl of the machine as it bore down on my scalp, the hair bouncing down onto the large towel and laying so limply, so sadly around me. My hair had come back dark and curly. What was next. What was next.

"I saw you. In the lake."

I looked up at him. "I know."

He struggled, his lips jumping, his eyes twitching. His eyes didn't meet mine, he just followed the path of the blades. "You said it was okay that I freaked out."

"In sickness and in health didn't mean just _me_, angel," I told him, stroking his hip. "Your body has taken some bad beatings over the years, but so has your insides. To be here for me, over and over. To marry me, when it means such a burden, so many decisions you have to make…to love me is taking in my sickness—you and me and a sickness—and a want," I said. "I want you to know that you always make me proud, Logan Bruno. Okay? At the end of the day, there are so many minutes I would kill to do over—stupid things, like tipping the girl at Starbucks more or doing something out of blue for Emmy and Randa. Sometimes, I really screw up, oh, God, all the time. But it's not the minutes where we mess up—Dr. Paves says it's what we do with the minutes we haven't used that defines us. That we have a chance in the _next_ minutes to show that we have learned. Fine, so you freaked out for fifteen, twenty minutes. It doesn't cancel out the hours and days and years of the man that I love, the man I married. And it doesn't taint the hours and days and _decades_ left to be lived. I trust you. I trust you, I trust you," I promised, and I began to write it into his body with my new, red nails.

My blood-colored nails. Logan was my blood now, family more than family: my family of choice. He moved the clippers over my head as I tugged up his shirt to touch the rippled plank of his torso. _I trust you, husband, I trust you, husband_, tattooing his skin with my faith. _I trusted you to get back up._

"You helped me get back up," he said simply, turning the clippers off. "Ghost or not. You helped me see back inside of myself." He took some shaving foam and put it on a few spots on my head; I twitched at the cold feel of it. As he began with the side closest to him, I kept my fingers curled over the waistband of his shorts, brushing over the fine blonde hair that trailed down from his bellybutton. He had promised me that he wouldn't kill himself if there were a baby. He had promised me he'd let me die if there was no choice. Logan, please tell me that when I leave, you won't follow.

Because I am so selfish, so achingly selfish that a small but way too large piece of me so desperately wants you to be by my side always. Come with me to the bedroom where we'll take the other door, lay me down in the blue grass, let it all dissolve but you and me.

"You look like Natalie Portman in _V for Vendetta_," Logan finally said, laughing a bit. "Should I get my Guy Fawkes mask?"

"Is that the movie where they blow up Parliament? The movie that had Tim nearly wetting himself, he was so furious?" I said, laughing with him.

"Jesus—_Tim_. There is a ghost I'm okay with not seeing. Somehow, I can just see him flirting, getting high, and woofing all day, completely ignoring the fact that he is, indeed, _dead_. And he'd constantly say shit like, Boyfriend! You stuck around! And I would say, for the four thousandth time, _Yes_. And then the woofing again! Us and our Eurotrash Poltergeist. It would be like a really bad sitcom," Logan mumbled, finishing the last patch of stubble.

"You better hope he didn't hear you," I said, wiggling my fingers ominously. "You know how Tim enjoys a good lark. Bugging the boyfriend who stuck would definitely rank up there." I moved my eyes up, watching his wrist as it curled, dragging the razor across my scalp. "You done?"

"One last thing," Logan said slowly, putting down the razor on the sink counter. He grabbed a washcloth and wet it; after he wrung it out, he looked at me with a sloe-eyed way that made my insides go slantways. Carefully, he began stroking my head with the cloth, wiping down the newly bare skin. After he had passed it over, cleaning it, he bent over the skin and kissed it, every inch. The cold wet feel of the cloth; the soft sugared warmth of Logan's lips, the coolness of his mint-scented breath baked over by that heat, the heat of him.

The last kiss was on my left temple, and he then offered me his hands, helping me to my feet. I took a step to the mirror, and he stood behind me, linking his arms around my chest, the diagonal scars from that not-so-long-ago surgery pink and shiny, flat. It was flat, and my stomach was large, I was a crazy, upside down version of a girl. Red skin, mottled skin, damaged skin, the yellow cast of chemo, the angry swell of my joints. A body battered, a warzone, with a strange swell of an oasis there in the middle. Without my eyebrows, I looked surprised as I stared at myself.

And I was, just a little, looking at my bald head. My runner's body had deteriorated, but there was still something fierce and strong there—and the round, smooth rise of my scalp reminded me of a sun, rising high.

"You look like a warrior," Logan told me, resting his head on my shoulder.

"I feel like one," I breathed, staring into my own dark eyes, getting ready to take on the world. I put my hands on my stomach: no, not the world. Just this little piece of it. This most important piece of all.

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This is what we did when we got to the hospital: played tic tac toe on a napkin, then on Logan's arm. I drew him a garden of flowers on the back of his hand; he drew a heart into my palm. We made up stories about the other people in the waiting room: this woman was a Chinese spy, trying to figure out the secret KFC crispy chicken recipe. That girl used to be best friends with Kirsten Dunst, but they stopped being friends when Kirsten told the girl to bring it—but alas, she could not.

We shared secrets—one of the best kinds. The naughty kind.

"I kinda like it when you kiss my toes," I admitted, my face turning a shade of red so deep, I felt all of the blood had raced to my cheeks.

"I really would like to do it in the water," he whispered, looking slyly from me to the other people in the room. Saying these things with other people around; my skin licked with heat.

"I'll get you a set of water wings for Christmas," I said, arching an eyebrow oh so coolly as I slowly bit my lip.

"Tease," he said, kissing the tip of my nose.

"No, a tease would have made a noodle related joke. Look at me, taking the high road," I smirked, and I kissed him back.

Look at us: just a young couple, still newlyweds, still high on this idea of a new shared life. So normal, always thinking about sex. So normal, goofing around. So normal, the way they tease and laugh and talk about boring things like grocery lists for later today and should we really have a party, who will take the dog to the vet?

This is what we didn't do: talk about how tomorrow, I have chemo

Talk about how on Thursday, I have an abortion scheduled.

Talk about how badly we want this. How our hands orbit my belly. How he thinks it's a girl.

A girl. Her brother. Richard.

My father Richard would take me to the doctor and put his hand on my shoulder. When I would cry over the shots, he would look at me, and his eyes would be so calm, my tears would disappear.

"I wish my dad were here," I heard myself saying as I laid on the examination table, after the nurse had been in, while we waited for the doctor.

"He has until November," Logan said. "We'll see if he comes around."

"I just want him here now," I whispered, and when Logan kissed me, I could feel the anger in his jaw. How our fathers hurt us. How our fathers fear something in us. When all we want is them. "If it's good news…I know Sharon will tell him, but…" I shook my head. "I—I can't. I—"

He stroked his thumb over my forehead and waited until my eyes cleared a bit. "So. Dr. Chaplin, I wonder if her hair will be in a ponytail today? I am betting yes."

I smiled at him and closed my eyes, leaning into his touch. "I will take that bet and raise you a pink ribbon in her hair."

There was a knock at the door, and I sat up. If the amnio results were bad, she wouldn't bother with an exam. It would just be: Bad News, Sympathetic Faces, and a Quiet Goodbye. "Hey Mary Anne, Logan," she smiled, her blonde hair long around her face.

"Your hair looks nice," I told her, and Logan pinched my palm.

She beamed at me. "Thank you! My guy's taking me out to lunch," she said, flipping open my folder. She scanned the forms as she sighed. "It feels weird not to have it in a ponytail."

"I like the ponytail," Logan said evenly. "But—I'd suggest a nice green ribbon, to match your eyes."

Dr. Chaplin peered at us, how we teetered on the brink of deadpan and losing it. "You two need a honeymoon," she pronounced, narrowing her eyes. The twinkle died a bit in her eye as she nodded. "And some answers. Good news or bad news."

"Bad," we said in unison.

"Wait," Logan blurted. As he blushed, he quickly crossed himself and hopped up on the table next to me, holding me tight in his arms. I could hear him whispering a Hail Mary, the speed of his Italian blurring into a mess of sharp sounding consonants and spark-bright vowels. "Okay."

The doctor's face creased with affection as she looked at him and then me. She wasn't much older than us—what did she think when she saw us? Two stupid kids who got pregnant, who refused to listen to reason? Two young adults, wishing for a miracle and thinking that two people willing it to happen was better than being alone? That we were foolish in love or that we were meant to be? Behind her eyes, did she understand or did she pity us, get frustrated with us, root for us?

But she grew calm and took in a breath. She had grown as a doctor since we had first seen her—less the sorority girl and more of a real woman, a _doctor _doctor who took charge from the first moment. Maybe we had something to do with that, how badly we needed her to make sense of it. To steer us right. "Mary Anne, you have preeclampsia. If you continue with the pregnancy, we need to make a serious schedule for bedrest between now and the end of term. You will have to take your blood pressure several times a day, you will have to be extremely careful, you will have to change your life if you want to bring a _new_ life into the world."

I nodded, and Logan nodded, and we looked stupid, the two of us silently bobbing, staring at her. Tell us. Tell us what we want to know.

"And the other bad news?" Logan said, clearing his throat once, twice. Like something was jammed there.

"No," she said simply. "That's all the bad news. I have your amnio results. And guys—you got yourselves on hell of an angel upstairs because God in heaven knows, when this came in, I was nearly in tears, expecting it to be…but it's—" She stopped and exhaled hard through her nose, shaking her head in a bewildered way. "—perfect. The baby is perfect. We say every day, in this hospital, there is a miracle every day. Congrats, you are Monday's miracle," she laughed, handing us a sheet of paper.

I curled over, my head on my knees, as Logan rubbed my back, his hand almost too hard over the knots of my spine. "What do you mean, 'perfect'?" he begged, the paper rippling in his shaking hand.

"Chromosome 17 is completely intact, no mutations, _no_ BRCA gene, no indication of Li-Fraumeni—and nothing that says ancephaly," she added, her voice warm. "I don't really want to speculate, but if you wanted to go really guessy? I'd say that the fetus that you lost was quite damaged," Dr. Chaplin said, touching my leg. "The likelihood that both of the twins would come out so genetically unscathed is…about zero. It looks like this one was meant to make it through. You've got yourself a fighter here, guys," she grinned.

"Well, okay, it's healthy genetically, but—is it a match?" Logan said, and the way it sounded like a plea, a prayer made me sit up and hold _him_. "For a transplant, is this baby a match? Is it worth it for her to go through this?"

She shifted in her chair, her eyes lidded as her hair fell over her cheeks. "Um. Your oncologist wanted to be the one to discuss that with you, tomorrow? But I said, are you kidding, they'll shit themselves—pardon my French," she added quickly, holding up a hand. "I mean, telling you that the baby is healthy and then saying, 'And wait for the stunning conclusion of this two-parter…tomorrow! Have a great night?' Shitty," she spat. "He just wanted to be the one to give you the bigger good news."

I stared at her as my arms went limp. "It's a match," I whispered. My lips began to twitch in a smile as I looked from her to my husband, his chalk-colored face, and back again, focusing on Dr. Chaplin's red-lined mouth. "The baby's a match for a transplant."

"Dr. Wilks is over the moon with the results, tomorrow after your treatment, he's going to go over it all with you," the doctor said, snapping the file shut. "Pretend to be excited—he really thinks I'd sit on it, what a geek."

I jumped off the table and threw my arms around her, laughing so hard my bones shook. "It's a match," I cried, and she giggled loud in my ear.

"So, I take it that you two want to keep going?" she teased, rubbing my back. She looked over my shoulder and gently disentangled herself from me, going over to Logan, who was doubled over, his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Like pages caught in a strong wind.

She put her arms around him. "Hey, Dad, it's okay, it's okay. Don't cry," she shushed, rocking him slightly, like a mother would. In the crook of her neck, I could see the peek of his eyes, squinched tight and overwhelmed with tears. He clutched to her like she was a savior. As if she were a life raft and he had forgotten that he could be rescued. That something _good_ could happen to us amidst all the bad.

He lifted off of her and within a breath, he had me in his arms, spinning us both until we were giddy-dizzy and pink-cheeked. "I can't—" he stumbled, his face crumbling down but his smile staying so bright. You can cry so hard you can't stand up and be stomach-flipping happy at the same time, you can. "I want—"

Logan swallowed. "I love you," he finally said.

I cradled his face in my hands., wiping his tears until my fingers were slick and wet. "I love you, too—Dad."

"Mom," he said back, carefully shaping the word in his mouth, as if it were the most perfect thing he had held on his tongue. The way he said _wife_. The way he said my name in the deepest pocket of the night, when we were making our bodies speak how much we felt for each other. He called me Mom, and it sounded so sweet and lovely—and so perfect, I couldn't believe I had never been called it before.

We looked back at Dr. Chaplin as she cleared her throat. "Not that we don't have a physical exam or tons of stuff to talk about or anything? But maybe you'd want to hear one last thing…"

We blurred through the rest of the appointment, and Logan raced to the parking garage to retrieve the car as I nearly bounced a mile in the air at the curb. He opened my car door and kissed each one of my fingers before shutting it, then leaping back into his seat. "We have to call my family, _right now_," he begged.

"No, no, your mom and dad are at work, Kerry and Hunter are God knows where…just…call your mom, have her get the whole family together," I urged. "We all have a lot to talk about, I don't want to have to say it five billion times. And Sharon has calls to make, too, to the rest of our family." I balled my hands into fists, clutching the papers in my lap. "I want to call Randa and Em _right now_."

"I need to call Dave. I need to call Coach and Shawn and the whole team? I have to call a billion people," Logan bubbled, moving the car as quickly as he dared.

"Dr. Paves—Eddie—I have to call her first, but he'll act all wounded and pissed," I laughed, clapping my hands together.

"Allison and Sean and Flynn and Kathleen. Erin and Jerry," Logan added. "My coach from Oak Hill. Superstar, God, I should almost call him first, he's ready to fly out here and kick my ass for not letting him help. He wanted to fly you to see doctors all over the place and whatever. Oh, shit—we have to tell Scalzi!"

"Who else," I said happily.

"The world," Logan laughed, steering the car onto the freeway and stamping on the gas pedal. "Absolutely everyone in the world."

We bumbled like drunkards up the stairs to Dawn's apartment, pounding on the door until Stacey opened it up, her face completely stunned. "The hell is going on," she said, her eyes wide and panicked, Dawn and Sharon springing to their feet as Henry walked from the tiny kitchen into the living room.

"Those are smiles?" he said tentatively as the three women stared, Stacey stepping back and taking Dawn's hand.

"These are smiles," Logan said, bouncing up on his toes.

I held out a paper: a sonogram. "And this is…the most perfect baby in the world. My match, a total match. And in November, we'll all meet her." I pressed the photo to my heart, pressed my hand into Logan's. "This is our girl."


	34. Chapter 31

**Third**

There was an unwritten map to Claudia's room, the places where we all sat. Kristy perched ramrod straight in the director's chair, her shoulders sharp and square. Dawn would take the desk chair, her long limbs pretzeling around its legs, resting her chin on its back as she lazily spun around, waiting for the meeting to start, waiting for a call to come, waiting for _something_ to happen. Abby took that chair later. They spun it in the same way.

Mallory and Jessi had spots on the floor, surrounded by canvases in all states of completion, boxes of charcoal and pastels, sketchbooks of all sizes, and the graveyard of clothes that Claudia had discarded over the past week. Or weeks, from the size of the piles. Still, in her chaos, somehow two little spots stayed clear, as if she was leaving the two younger girls places to find and expand. Making room for them the way that the club did, those small spaces.

On the bed, there was a sloppy row of Stacey, Claudia, and I. Claud was up near her pillows, beating them into shapes as she wedged them between her body and the wall. Stacey might take one and prop herself against it, too, bumping shoulders with Claudia every now and again, a Morse code of contact. A little nudge when Kristy was on the warpath. Two knocks of the knee when someone was talking about a boy. Elbows smudging together as weekend plans were discussed. I didn't touch them, from my spot on the end of the bed, my legs neatly creased and folded—unless I had a skirt on, then it was crossed at the knees, thank you, this isn't a free show—with the record book perched in my lap. Pen ready. Always ready.

There was one exception to that, of course, the codicil to the Room Arrangement: The Boyfriend Clause. When Logan came, we'd usually move down the floor, near the bookshelf so that he could see out of a window and zone out when the meeting took a decided girly turn. His long legs would be crossed, bouncing constantly, and he'd lean his weight back against his left hand, hidden behind me, and he would dare to whisper a thumb against the small of my back every now and again.

Poor Shannon: she was on her own. She'd stare at the floor in dismay, looking like she was fighting the urge to call in the Merry Maids. Or hazardous waste disposal. No wonder she never came to meetings; "busy," I'm so sure. Can't blame her, though.

My hospital room had that same feel to it, too—everyone had a spot, _their_ spot, and when different combinations of friends would come, I would watch a bit in awe as they coordinated who got the end of the bed this time. Who got the chair nearest to me. Who grabbed the ends of the futon. There was a secret hierarchy at work: Logan had first dibs, then Barbara, then there would be a minor hesitation between Miranda, Emily, and Dawn—the sister and the feel-like-sisters. And in that moment, Stacey would always swoop in. Then slowly, the dance became a routine. And then a habit.

And it's happening again.

In the months since I had come home to Chapel Hill from Stoneybrook, my friends had charted the seating geography of my bedroom. I was supposed to stay in bed most of the day—it was a necessary topographical activity. Logan moved the furniture around, enough room for a small loveseat, while Stacey reorganized the closet--"Oh, my God, is this _flannel_?" And out the window it would go, making just enough room to get rid of the dresser. Now, we could have an armchair, too.

At first, it was easy: the sisters-that-weren't would flop on the bed while Jeremy and Erin and Davis and Keshawn rotated in a lazy circuit from the couch to the chair. Sharon, on her visit in August, sat at my feet, her hand calm and steady on my leg.

When Stacey left for school, my girls arrived: Miranda had gotten into UNC, Emily had accepted to Duke, her ego leading her east. My girls would arrive, full of stories from school and that yellow-pulsing energy of health. Miranda would hurry to the TV and flip it on before flopping across the end of the bed, her legs sticking up, linked together as she bent her knees back and forth. Emily hopped on the other corner of the bed, leaning against the back of the loveseat, angled to see the television screen and me, her legs stretching out and touching mine. Dawn took Logan's empty side of the bed, closest to the door, constantly running down to the kitchen to get me more water. More chicken tortilla soup. More ice. More peppers. More, more, more.

She had stopped asking me what I wanted.

She just knew.

And she always smiled.

And at night, when the sun was sinking low, my husband would come home, looking exhausted. The slam of the door, the thunk of his bookbag in the office, the pound of his feet on the stairs—he was home. And he would slip into the same spot, _his_ spot, right behind me as if he were a part of the headboard, and he would hold me…though it took me a while to realize that I was holding him up as he tried to find a way to sink right in me. You are good, you are doing good, you are so beloved, my angel.

It's all going to be alright.

On a Tuesday in late October, three days before Halloween, I stared around our room and swore I could see all of the shifting bodies that filled up the room. Who made me feel less lonely and stranded, stuck here on the island of this bed, while all of my friends went to class, went out to dinner, went _out_. There was always at least one person here, using the room as a place to study or watch TV or a movie. To talk.

I knew who was behind it: Dawn. Just like that old chart when I had been in the hospital back my junior year, blocking out hours where people would be with me. I was as certain of that as I would that there would be air to breathe.

Logan yawned as he came back in from the shower, a towel twisted around his waist. "Man, Emily sure does snore like a trucker," he said, sucking in some air between his teeth as he went towards the heap of his work out clothes, sweat-heavy and stained from his early morning training.

"Only when she's drunk," I smiled, leaning back against the headboard. "She has a class at ten, make sure she's up in time?" Shaking my head I added, "And next time, make sure she _doesn't_ drink so much, okay?"

"Hey, I'm not the one who challenged her to a drinking contest—blame your sister for that," Logan protested, holding up his hands. "When I left the restaurant, the two of them were only on their second round. This is in no way my fault, pretty girl. I have learned the hard way—when Emily starts a drinking competition, get the _hell_ away."

I laughed at the misery on his face and absently stroked my dog, curling my fingers over her hard stomach. "She is Captain Jack, all right," I giggled. I looked over the room again. "Angel, where do you think Ry will sit, when she comes to visit."

Logan looked back from the closet, a shirt dangling from his hands. "On her broom, levitating in the corner?" he suggested. With a sigh, he shook his head. "Mary Anne, she won't be visiting us. She sends her Wally Juice without comment, why would she come?"

I shrugged. "I just have a feeling."

"Yeah?" He pulled on his shirt and stepped into a pair of boxers before coming over to the bed, laying back down on his side, the sheets there having grown cool from his absence a few hours ago. "Like…just a feeling or a dream?"

"Just a feeling," I said, stroking my thumb over his head. "I did have a dream last night—Mom and Babs brought me a cake, for making remission. When I blew out the candles, I woke right up. It was nice, I felt really…safe with them, I did."

His face pinking with a smile, Logan said, "I was wondering when they'd come to you. I swear, last week, I have never smelled oranges as strongly as I did when Dr. Wilks gave us the remission news." He bit his lip, rubbing his hand over the large rise of my belly, this bowling ball where my flat stomach used to be. Hello, baby. Healthy baby. We'll see you soon. She was still, though, and his hand moved up to my flat chest, slipping under my tank top, and tracing over one of my scars. One of the scars we could see. "Still. This Ry thing—are you sure, Tess, that she's coming?"

"Yes," I said simply. "She is." I had to change the subject: discussing the impending arrival of hocus-pocus was too much for me. Something witchy this way comes. But why? Oh, God, change the subject…basketball? Class? I could seduce him, as easy as breathing, get him to forget Ry under the fog of _us_. Okay, that was just dirty pool. A lot of fun, but dirty pool. Instead, I laughed, tugging at his shirt. "Have I thanked you yet for showering? I mean, honestly, husband, does anyone sit near you during your eight am?"

He laughed back, that silvered sound of his voice, making my bones hum. "You know, the first week, everybody and their cousin wanted to sit next to me—oooh, lookit the basketball player," he said in a sticky, awed voice. "But very quick, they realized that I'm a bit ripe from training…and now I have the whole row to myself. I like to think of it as Manisweat Destiny."

I began to curl, I was laughing so hard. "So that's what explains the western expansion. You know, the settlers didn't bathe—"

"And suddenly, we were stretching from sea to shining sea. Or lecture hall. Whichever works," he grinned, resting his head on my chest. "Oh, Tess," he said with a happy sigh, rubbing a hand over my bald head. "Things have been going so well lately."

"What, your conquistadorian success is making life awesome?" I teased, gazing down at him. Oh, my sweet angel. Please let things stay this way—he had been so peaceful lately, so _happy_. School had started, basketball had started, and he was working harder than before…but Logan was best when he could pour himself into things. He came home tired, his eyes shadowed by blue-purple smudges, but there was a smile in those beautiful blue circles. Happiness. August had been a hard month for my chemo, September was a double-whammy of chemo and sudden sickness and swelling and just the overall shock of my body suddenly screeching, _Holy crap, I'm having a baby!_ But that passed. I turned twenty and blew out a cakeful of candles that burned bright like hope. And I made my remission. Now, all we had to do was wait.

Our future was just a match away. And everything would be okay.

It had to be.

If you say it, it could be true. It could be you.

My gaze became velvet on his skin, and I ran my fingers along his jaw. "Yeah, they have been, angel. And they'll stay that way."

Logan pressed his lips into a thin, white line. "Mary Anne, I just…every time I think we're fine again, something happens." He looked to the side and then back at me, the shock of his water-clear eyes making my heart pause for a moment. "I was thinking about this, while I was running this morning—well, in between telling the damn freshmen to quit their shit, God, they get so—"

"Logan. Focus," I grinned, wrinkling my nose as I tickled his neck.

"Right," he said sheepishly. "Anyway. If like were a Blockbuster video store? Our life would be filed under 'drama.' And probably in between _The English Patient_ and _Love Story_," he sighed.

I urged his face up to meet mine, bolting my lips to his in a long kiss, as if my tongue could Braille into his, _No, no. Believe._ _It's all sunshine from here._ "Well, I'm the new manager of Blockbuster," I said, exhaling into his mouth, running the line of his nose with my own. "And I'll allow you to file it in 'drama,' but only in this brand new subsection—'The Sometimes Sad Story with the Happiest of Endings.'"

He beamed at me, and there was a sunrise here in our bed. "See, even when I get pessimistic…you know just how to make it better. You're good, _tesorina_. You should take your act on the road."

"This bed has wheels," I said with a sly nod. "Let's rock this bitch, as Ben Folds once said. First stop, Arizona. I'd like to see mountains."

"I see a mountain," he teased, rubbing my stomach again. "The best kind."

"Are you calling me fat," I asked, narrowing my eyes.

"Oh, yeah, totally," Logan grinned, and he came back to me like a wave, and everything was swept away but him and me and the magic of just an ordinary Tuesday.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"She is _such_ a heinous bitch! Really, when they make human taxidermy legal, she's gonna be the first person I stuff and mount," Miranda seethed, crossing her arms again over her chest.

Emily looked up from her textbook, bemused. "May, say it with me." Together we chanted, "Your hair looks fine." For the fifth time in ten minutes.

"She's the demon barber of Franklin Street," Miranda snapped, looking at her ends in horror. "How is this a trim—how is _this_ a _trim_? Collarbone is not a trim, it's a fucking scalping! That's it, we're forming a posse. Where's Dawn, she's always up for a revolution. May, get the pitchforks. I'll grab the torches—bitch is going down."

"One, she's picking up dinner," Emily said calmly. "Two, cutting her hair was like the shibboleth for Dawn, she's in love with the chop and go. Three—are you really whining about your hair in front of May? Randa, _honestly_. Lay back, think of England, and shush!"

Miranda's face creased in apology. "Oh, May, I'm sor—"

"Hey, I embrace my Mr. Clean 'do," I grinned, reaching out to rub her leg. "But actually, I know better than most how much it sucks to lose hair, even if there's still a lot less. Come on, Ran, less hair means more of that beautiful face being seen…"

"Oooh, you're good," Miranda giggled, putting her hand on mine. "My vanity is the easy target, I own it." She sighed a bit, looking out the open door to the guest bedroom, the sunset lighting the room in soft reds. "It's gonna suck when Sharon comes. Not like that," she said quickly. "But—Emmy and I can't crash here and snuggle on the nice bed. The pull out bed smells like old people."

"It's true. I attacked that fucker with Febreeze, and it was no dice," Emily sighed. "I really do think its previous owners were of the geriatric variety. I think that baby once had doilies on it," she added with a shudder.

I winced. "Yeah, I've never had the pleasure of sleeping on it. You two could always try bribing Logan to give up his side of our bed…wait, no, I veto that. I'm a demanding pregnant woman, and I do demand my husband whenever possible as my snuggle partner. I have a very particular way of sleeping lately, and he's part of the equation. I swear, it's so hard to get comfy," I grumbled.

"Well, I can't see why. It's not like you have changed at all in shape," Emily said dryly, and I tossed J.B. at her head. She caught it, sticking out a bit of her tongue at me. "Remind me again…Sharon is coming…two weeks before the due date?"

I nodded. "Her last day at work is the tenth, so she said she'd be here on the fifteenth." And where would Dad be? Stoneybrook? Or would he come, too? Logan told him he had until November…I hadn't asked Sharon, I hadn't said a word to her about how much I wanted him, needed him. He knew already. This had to come from him.

As I welcomed my baby into the world—I might have to say goodbye to my father from my life. My entire body seemed to slip, and I reached out and clutched Emily's hand. She looked at me, her face coloring over in that chalky shade of panic. I shook my head quickly: she was so used to all of my alarms, the cancer ones, the pains, the moments to call for the doctor. But this was different.

This was just my heart.

I cleared my throat loudly and nodded again and again, like a broken bobblehead. "So, yeah, she'll be here. But until the baby is born or I need her here all the time, she's going to stay with Dawn. Then she'll move in and become Grandma Number One while I'm doing the transplant. So no worries, that bed is still Randemmyland until then," I said with a firm nod.

Emily's thumb was gentle over my knuckles. "I'll make a flag. Plant it right on the headboard."

Miranda's hand on my leg was still rubbing circles, warm and steady even through the thick blanket. When I met Miranda's eyes, they were full of concern. But I begged her with my eyes, begged her to be my Randa, the funny ball of energy that made even the scariest days okay. Randa, making jokes. Emmy, being the leader. And it used to be Babsie, sweet and strong. Even with just the three of us, I still needed them the way we had always been. For a moment, I wondered what my role was, in their crises. No, I knew. I was the one who would talk you through it: listening more than talking.

Maybe Eddie was right—maybe I did have a gift for therapy. Maybe.

"I support the flag. Your colors don't run," I grinned, a real grin, at them both, and they seemed to rock back into relaxation. "You know who I want to visit?"

"Allison? Kathleen or Sean and Flynn? Jeff, Kerry and Hunter? Jessi? Davis? Stacey," Emily guessed.

I blinked. "Well, yes, But—not _them_, specifically. But I'd take them, happily."

"If you say Ry, I might have to barf all over the bed. And then barf on the loveseat, out of spite," Miranda said flatly.

I whacked her with a pillow before scooting up a bit, shoving it behind my upper back. I truly hated this bed. On the other hand, it was better than the hospital bed I'd be in for weeks after the transplant. It had my friends perched on it, and it had Logan in it at night. Okay, fine, Bed, you're awesome. "No. Eddie and Ana—Dr. Paves," I said quietly, my eyes filling with tears. Shit. "She's been in my life, been my support for almost as long as Sharon…and she's in stupid Seattle. I mean, she better be having the best damn coffee of her _life_," I said, trying to force my voice into something light. "But. I miss her."

Emily scooted close to me and wrapped her soft arms around my shoulders. "Oh, Maybelle."

I leaned against her, smiling at Miranda as she joined me on my other side, kissing my hand. "Stupid hormones," I said with a shaky laugh. Sighing, I admitted in a shy voice, "Did I tell you guys? We seriously considered Analisa. For the name. But 'Analisa Barbara' sounded a bit odd. Annelise is on the list, though."

Miranda rubbed my cold fingers and bounced a bit. "Oh! I came up with a name!"

"Not 'Miranda' again," Emily groaned, giving my scarf a tug before loosening her grip on me.

"Um, no—'Miranda Bruno' is my idea of a nightmare," she shuddered. "Instead. I vote for Shelly."

Emily's nose wrinkled. "'Shelly Barbara?' That sounds like a dippy ass newscaster from the, like, Biloxi NBC affiliate who does the really shitty human interest pieces on how, years after Katrina, there is still much to be done—but gosh darn, if the great people of Mississippi don't have their spunk still," Emily said, picking up a thick and false Southern accent at the end, her face turning plastic and chipper.

"That was well thought out," I said slowly.

Miranda hid behind me. "Mommy, the lady's face is _scary_."

"It's the Botox!" Emily said, robotically cheery.

I patted her face. "Stay in the print media. Please."

Emily laughed, reaching over to my bedstand and grabbing the list of names. "Okay. I really like 'Abigail,' still, I think that's my favorite," she said with a slow nod. "And as much as I love Allegra…'Allegra Barbara'—doesn't that sound a bit weird? Or is that just me. I don't like the 'a' sounds," she mused, tapping the paper with a finger.

"I get this weird impression that Babsie doesn't want the baby named after her, but I just can't put my finger on it," I said, chewing on my lip.

As she toyed with her hair, Miranda frowned. "Well—next time you dream about her, just ask her."

"That's not how it works—they are very coy ghosts," Emily told her. She reached down to the floor and pulled out a notebook. "Ever since Babs made the window shut, I've charted the pattern of them, how they talk to May. May's mom shows up when she's trying to send a warning—you know, showing up when May's awake. When Alma comes in dreams, she never really answers direct questions: she has her own agenda, she doesn't get direct, and it has to be because she's scared that May get too close and follow," Emily said matter of factly. "Barbara, she comes to May in dreams when she knows that our girl needs support. Answering something dumb like about a middle name—not her style."

I looked down at the journal, at Emily's notes. Research. "It's hard for her, to be close. I know it is," I murmured, resting my hands on my stomach as the baby began to kick, hard. "I can tell Mom's around all the time, but Babsie only comes around once in a while. I could say out loud, Babs, I need to know the answer, I _need_ it, and I bet she'd find a way to tell me…but I don't want to hurt her."

Miranda's face shadowed with a wry smile. "I bet I know why Barbara doesn't want you to name the baby after her."

"Why?"

"Because Babs would never think she deserved an honor like that," she said simply. "She probably thinks there is someone better, or that you and Lee should just chose the name on your own."

The knot that had been tightening in my stomach ever since Logan and I had picked Barbara for the middle name loosened, and the baby stopped kicking. "That's it," I said, beaming at her. "Oh, thank God, I was certain that it was some kind of _sign_ sign."

"Nah, our girl's just too humble and insecure for her own good," Miranda giggled. She looked up at the ceiling, her eyes suddenly bright. She stuck out her tongue a bit and then took a deep breath. "We are all so silly. Well, except for me. I'm awesome. I stole Dawn's necklace a few weeks ago, it says I am."

"Oh, yes, the jewelry is such a reliable character witness," Emily snorted, thumping Miranda with J.B.

"Yes. It's _shiiiny_," she purred. "The shiny never lies." She looked at me and laced our fingers together. "I know, I'm not…Dr. Paves or whatever, but do you want me to stay around tonight? I mean, your Dookies are busy, Dawn's got her date, Emmy's got newspaper…I've just got to drink appletinis and watch _Gossip Girl_. Which is essential, but I can do that here. Do you want me to stay, babe?"

"No, Ran, I'm okay, thanks," I smiled, squeezing her hand. "I know this is your special time with your roommate, you, your roommate, and your third roommate, Appletini," I laughed. "Dawn'll be here until Logan comes home, and Tuesdays are a really hard practice day for him, so I think we'll just end up crashing way early. But thank you." I took in a ragged breath and blurted, "When do I get to be here for you guys like you're here for me?"

"Pardon?" Emily said, her eyes popping wide.

"You two—when do I—I take so much—"

"Hormones," Miranda said in a stage whisper to Emily. I tried to protest, but she grabbed my chin, holding it so tight, it almost hurt. "Whenever we need you, you are here for us, with all of our petty boy and girl and life dramas. The thing is, May, is that you are _here_. If you die, you won't be _here_. So yeah, we're gonna give and give so that in ten years, when Emmy's having a meltdown over being hideously overworked and underpaid at ESPN or whatever, when I'm locked in a loveless marriage—but the guy is totally rich, so I have to wait out the ten years and two kids until the prenup kicks in—you'll be _here_. Do you understand?"

"I wouldn't let you marry a guy just for money," I whispered, looking in her eyes.

"That's why I need you here. To kidnap me in my Vera Wang dress and steal me away to Mexico, where Emmy will be waiting with a huge pitcher of margaritas," she said smoothly. "Because I know how to tune Em out by now—"

"Hey!" Emily squeaked. "True—but ouch!"

"—but I'll listen to you," Miranda said easily. "So this is all selfish. Being here for you now is really all to benefit me."

I began to laugh despite myself, until I was a saggy heap of giggles and bones and the large orbit of my baby-heavy stomach. Emily put her hands on the bump. "Don't forget. We're also in it to be in control of little baby Bruno. You will do our bidding, mix your aunties lots of martinis and let us dress you up like we're Stacey on a bender at a mall. Yeees, baby, you will be _ours_," she intoned dramatically.

The three of us collapsed into laughter, hugging tight and cracking up over and over again. A bright circle, the three of us, and I could swear, our laughter was the color of strawberries.

"What's so funny?" Dawn asked, coming into the bedroom with a tray full of Indian food. My mouth instantly began to salivate, and I forced myself back into calm as I stared at the chicken saag. "I'll go get the rest of it—but I want to know the answer now."

"I'll help," Emily offered. She paused. "Oh, just Randa being Randa."

"I'm awesome," Miranda said solemnly.

Dawn tilted her head, her blonde bob knocking against her jaw. "That reminds me. I lost my Awesome necklace."

Oh, God. I began to snort and then exploded into giggles again, the baby beginning to kick dizzily against my skin as Miranda nearly cried with laughter. Dawn gave us a look that clearly screamed, _You all are insane_, before turning around and heading back out the door. Emily followed, giving Miranda and I warning looks, trying to belt back her own laughter before she left.

"Behave," I hissed.

"Never," she sniffed, kissing me on the cheek.

Good. I never want you to, either, I thought, holding tight to her and smiling despite myself, looking around the room and realizing just how full it could be.

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Logan pulled the blankets up around my body, the thick fluff of them warming every inch of my cold frame. "Do you want me to get another one?" he asked, looking around the dark yard.

"Angel, I have _five_ blankets on me," I laughed, tugging on his hand. I had just been in his arms, as he carried me downstairs and out here, but I already missed them. I was hungry for as much of his touch I could get. Sean and Flynn's words echoed in my head—how lonely the transplant would be. I had to get as much as I could now. "Come on. Hammock nice," I teased.

"Wife nicer," Logan said, raising an eyebrow as he began to climb in next to me, the hammock rocking under the movement. But he paused, looking back at the house. "Did you hear the doorbell?"

"Even if I did, I'm ignoring it. Your Wife Nicer wants her Husband Nicest next to her," I grinned, folding back the blankets.

Logan's smile was bright, but brief. "I better go see—I mean, it could be Shawn, dropping off those tapes of Heinrich and Collison Coach gave us."

"I take it, he took them first?" I asked as Logan began to retreat.

"Would I ever tell that boy no? He'd eat me for lunch," he snorted, breaking into an easy jog as he headed back inside, J.D. trotting after him, her tongue long and pink as it flopped out of her mouth. I took a deep breath and looked up at the cloudy sky, heavy with the threat of rain. But I wanted to feel fresh air, no matter how thick with humidity, how damp. I wanted condensation on my skin.

Hey, baby, I thought, pressing my hands to my bare belly. Will you love it outdoors as much as I do? Will you be a runner like me, or a team athlete like your daddy? Will you love school as much as us or be like your auntie Dawn and want to find your own way amongst all of the amazing things in the world? Tell me that no matter who you end up being, you'll be happy.

That bringing you into this world will be a blessing to you, not just to me. To your daddy and me.

Tell me that you'd bring him joy, even if—

Logan came back out of the house, his face grim. I opened my mouth, but then Dawn stepped out from behind his long, strong body. Her hair was still bouncing in the curls that I had painstakingly rolled in one by one after dinner, but her face was completely naked of the makeup she had put on. She looked odd, with her fancy hair and fancy dress and her sad, blank face.

"Sis," I said quickly, struggling to sit up. "What's wrong." Sharon. Jeff. Stacey. Oh, God.

"Henry and I broke up," she said, bursting into tears as she curled onto the hammock next to me.

Is it bad that I felt relief? I held her tight and glanced up at Logan as he quick muttered something about getting drinks as he went back to the house. "Dawnie," I whispered, spreading the blankets over her. "What happened, tell me."

"Stacey said it's not my fault, but it is my fault," she whimpered, huddling closer. "It is, May. I broke up with him. I just couldn't," she managed, dissolving back into sobs. I held her like a child, letting her cry into my neck the entire time it took Logan to return with a large mug of coffee. She took it gratefully, sitting up with the blankets tangled over her bare legs.

"I'll leave you be," he murmured, stepping back again, but Dawn shook her head.

"Stay, Lee," she said, giving him a small smile, and I could tell, even though she had used that nickname, there was something so much like love there. The way you'd treat a brother. Which he was, wasn't he. Logan settled down by my feet, squeezing my toes, and the two of us locked our eyes on Dawn.

"What happened, sweetie," I asked quietly, brushing back a bit of her hair.

She took in a hesitant gulp of air and then sighed hard. "Well. We went to that little Italian place, the one with the twinkle lights? And it was so romantic," she said, her face wrinkling again with sadness. She was beginning to crush my hand, she was holding it so tight, but I didn't dare untangle it from hers. Dawn breathed again and continued, "So, we're just talking…and he mentioned next semester, okay? And he asked if I was still going to be here, and I said, Well, yeah, because May will most definitely need me, and I'm her sister, I'm gonna be here," she gulped, her words rushing out. "And the book is going so slow, it's so slow, because it is turning out to be more about Sunny, and it just hurts so bad to write about her, it's taking a ton of time, but really, I just have no desire to go back yet, so does it matter? I'm here for May, that's the most important thing," she sniffed.

"No, the most important thing is to do what makes you happy," I said gently, as Logan told her, "Of course it's hard to write about Sunny. Of course."

Dawn sniffed again, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand and taking a long drink of coffee. "Stace was right. You two are the Affirmation Patrol." I caught Logan's eye, and he raised his eyebrows, but stayed silent. "Anyway, he got all excited…and then said that once Mary Anne gets out of the hospital, and you two don't need me all the time, I should move in with him—then he started talking about when we should get engaged—"

And I blanched. Henry, _no_. It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. And then insulting the bull's mother. Then slashing the bull's tires and going to the bathroom on its favorite shirt.

"Doesn't he know, you don't want that stuff?" Logan asked carefully, bracing himself a bit, as if he knew that Dawn would lash at him.

Instead she sighed. "Yes. But—in his head…if I'm here, why wouldn't we last and be together? And then take the next steps. I mean, when I told him, No way, he said back to me that he's twenty-seven, he wants to settle down…and I told him over and over, I can't, I can't, can't we just be in love and have that be enough?"

"What did he say?" I prodded gently, giving her time to take a sip of the hot drink. It was bringing back color to her face, her miserable face. Oh, how first love can ache. I glanced again at Logan. The first time we broke up, back in middle school, my heart just split open. The second time, I wanted to die, even though I knew it was the most right thing to do—Eighth Grade Logan was a mercurial creature, controlling and gentle all at once. He didn't know how to care for a person without living their life. But he had grown, up like a tree.

What if I had told my Logan that I didn't want to get married, when he was so ready for it? He would have married me the day I turned eighteen. What if I had told him that I wanted to wait?

He would have. When I died, he waited for me to come back. He knew I would. Why not believe it again?

I had a sudden urge to kiss him, to hold him, to thank him. Thank you for growing up, my angel. Thank you for being you.

Dawn let out a small sob, so I held _her_, stroking her hair. "He told me that I was being a baby, that marriage is a great thing—and then—then he said, Your sister is married, and she and her husband are so happy being together," she cried. She looked away from me and rushed, "And I told him, I'm not May, and I don't want to be. I'm sorry, sis, I just—can't—"

"Hey, don't be sorry," Logan said quickly, reaching forward to touch her knee. "It's your life, Dawn, you know what you want, don't be ashamed of that."

She gave him a smile and then leaned against me. "It's over, May. He said that if I didn't see myself with him in the long term—after all of the drama to get together, if I didn't want to commit to him…and not like an 'I Love You, Let's Just Wait and See' commit, but wedding bells and babies commit…then I was basically saying that it's over." She began to wail, clutching at me so hard that my scarf fell off. "It's over, we're over."

I whispered hushes in her ear, rocking her back and forth. She inhaled sharply over and over, like she wanted to speak, and I waited. But she finally said, "I don't want to talk about it. Just…it was okay, for me to say no?"

"Yes," Logan told her.

"If that's what you want, Dawnie, then it was absolutely okay," I agreed.

"How come Stace and Davis can be patient, but Henry can't?" she sniffed. "Why aren't I like that? I wish I could—I mean, I love him—I wish—"

Logan shrugged. "They are different people. We're all different people, Dawn. It's why some of us get along and some don't. It's why, when you envy someone's life, you have to understand…even though you want it, because those people are different, if you got it? It might not be right for you at all," he said. He swallowed. "Sometimes, I look at other couples, people who are always happy and carefree and don't have to worry about Power of Attorney and don't have to hate themselves over staying in school and letting their mother-in-law take care of their baby. Who don't pray every day that their wife will be there in the morning, that she gets another day."

My breath caught in my throat, and Dawn lifted her head, staring at him, but Logan shook his head. "Dawn, Dawnie—as much as I think, Damn, it'd be nice to be them—the life that I have with Mary Anne has led us to have the kind of relationship that we have. How we are with each other, how we act as individuals—our Blockbuster drama has made me into a guy she wants, made her into the woman I want, made us the kind of couple we are. It's about who we are as people, at the very heart of it, that says how we are in relationships. Dawn, you love who you are—it's why we all love you, because you cling hard to who you are now. If you changed yourself for Henry, you'd be no better than how you were back in eighth grade with that dick Travis."

Dawn gave him a shaky smile. "I ended up getting those piercings. But. I got them when I wanted them," she added in a small voice. She took another drink of the coffee and then leaned forward to kiss Logan on the cheek. "Thanks—bro," she added with a sly grin.

"Anytime, _sis_," he grinned. He bumped her knee a bit. "Hey. I know this blows ass, but…I'd rather have you bitching me out to get that anger out of your head than try to be someone you're not."

"Does that mean I can keep calling you gay, Lee? Because you are," she said flatly. She pointed at my belly. "I know what we can name the baby: Subterfuge O'Denial."

Logan rolled his eyes at her. "Nice. A bit long—and too Irish, pass. We're firmly Italian around here, thanks though. Try again."

I rubbed Dawn's back. "Do you want to stay the night? We can put in some movies, have lots of ice cream and peppers—"

"If you two want to have the bedroom, I'll sleep in the guest room," Logan offered. "I'm fine with it."

Dawn shook her head. "I think…I need to call Mom. And then Stacey. I have to talk to Stacey," she said, her eyes growing thick with need. And I didn't feel even a whisper of jealousy, just the desire that she talk to the person she needed most. "But—if I need company, can I use my key? Crash in the guest room?"

"Of course," I said as Logan nodded.

Dawn looked at us, her face drawn and worn as she stood. "Okay," she nodded. She gave me a quick kiss. "I love you, sis, thanks. I'll be over at the same Bat time in the morning—do pancakes sound good for breakfast?"

"Very—I love you, too, and don't hesitate to come over, we're here," I told her again, squeezing her hands.

Dawn smiled shakily at me and then looked at Logan, opening up her arms. "C'mere, Lee," she said quietly, and he stood up, enveloping her in his long, ropey arms. It reminded me of when he hugged Kerry, his tall golden-haired sister. They looked just about right, too. I saw her whisper something in his ear, something that made him flinch in surprise and then look at her as if she had just announced that it was Christmas Day. She pulled away and gave a half-hearted wave before heading towards the gate that led to the driveway, the mug still clutched in her hands.

I waited until the gate closed behind her before whipping my head to look at Logan. "What did she say to you?"

"You want to stay out here or go inside?" he said instead, absently looking back at the house.

I gave my head a shake. "Um. Go in, I guess. Logan—what? Tell me, please."

He helped me wrap the blankets around my body and scooped me into his arms as if I were as light as promises. Kissing me gently once, twice, he smiled so close to me, I could see my eyes reflected in his. "She said…that I need to keep living my life for _you_ when you're in the hospital, that it's what you need," he began. "And…she apologized. For what she said in the bathroom that night." He looked away as his lips shook for a second. "She said…that she understood why you call me angel."

My heart skipped a beat, my rollercoastered heart, and I stared at him, mouth open, eyes clouded with wonder. Dawn. Dawn said that.

For the first time, she saw him like I see him, this gold-covered heart that was Logan-shaped. That my Logan was a good man—and worth her love, too.

Which was good—since only a few weeks later, as I lay dying, Logan would need her more than ever. More than any of us could have known.


	35. Chapter 32

I haven't replied to any reviews—and to a few emails and PMs, yeeps—because I've been kinda under the weather. But! I'll get back on the horse. Besides…it's procrastinating on Meant to Be revisions, and I'm always up for that (sigh, kidding. Kinda).

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Mariah tapped her foot against the tile and checked her watch. "Hello? Fucknut? Any day now, thanks," she snapped at the ticket agent.

"Miss, if you'd please just be patient—and please, avoid the profanity," he added, his teeth gritted tight as he grabbed her suitcase.

"I'm sorry," she said sweetly, her eyes narrowing. "That you are obviously a five year old girl who's never heard a swear in his life. Asshat. I got somewhere I gotta be, like, uh, _now_."

He put the tag on her bag. "You'll be in North Carolina soon enough, Miss."

She sighed, jerking the suitcase away, the large box of it thumping against her overpacked corduroy bag. "No. Not soon enough," she mumbled, reaching into the bag and pulling out a bottle of purple juice, holding it like a sword as she cut through the crowd, the silver ball of her tongue ring glinting as she bit it between her teeth. "No."

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Dawn pulled the Velcro apart on the blood pressure cuff and smiled at me. "No better, no worse. No worries," she added with a firm nod, stuffing the sphygmometer back into a basket. She quickly jotted down my blood pressure into a small notebook and snapped it shut.

"Do I get to see?" I asked, reaching up to snatch it, but she was too tall, too quick. Too annoying. It's my blood pressure, don't I have a right to know what it is?  
Apparently not. "It just stresses you out. Which drives it up higher, and hello? This is what scientists call 'a vicious cycle,'" Dawn told me in a prim tone, air quoting with the smuggest fingers I had ever seen. If Dawn became a doctor, I think she'd have patients bitchslapping her before she could even ask them to say _Ahh._

I rolled my eyes, pulling the fleece blanket up to my chest as I sank lower on the couch. "You're a vicious cycle," I muttered.

"Wow. Biting comeback," she grinned, plopping on the couch by my feet. She peered at me. "You okay? Do you need another nap? Usually you sling zingers like Waffle House hash browns, sis."

"I'm okay. Logan'll be home soon, I don't want to be asleep when he gets here," I said. "I'm just a bit—stir-crazy, I guess. I would kill for a run right now," I sighed, gazing out into the muted sunlight of early evening. "He promised that he'd take me for a nice long push in the wheelchair tomorrow…but it's not the same."

Dawn rubbed my feet between her hands; they were so swollen, so sore. When we did go out—to the doctor, really, that was the only time—someone had to shove my toes into flip-flops. I was so used to my body becoming a battleground but for cancer—the burden of a baby had changed every inch of me. Swollen and strange, the parameters of my skin had morphed into a strange junction of bloated joints and rounded parts. Who did this body belong to?

To the baby. So that one day, I could have a body that was just mine. No cancer, no sickness, nothing would own these bones and this blood. Just Mary Anne.

Except my heart: that had belonged to someone else for years now.

Funny, that piece of me had failed so many times. My doctors were stunned, always stunned at how it came back, healthy and strong. _It shouldn't be like this_, they'd mutter, cardiologists and specialists, all of them flipping through the papers in my files, the echocardiograms, the pulse tests. _After the heart attacks, Mary Anne, your heart shouldn't be--_ Healthy? Whole? But it always was, always stronger, always back to solid. _It's a miracle_, my cardiologist at Duke murmured, examining the tests from Stoneybrook. _It's like it never had distress, I—maybe your body is just…that strong? From all of your treatments, I—I don't know_.

I did. Because it wasn't my heart. It was his. Logan tended to it with the care of a constant gardener, blanketing it with a red-colored care, so gentle, so sure. My heart could skip out, but it went to him—that's how I always knew that I'd come back. Break my heart any which way you want. He'll bring me back.

But what if my body failed in some other way? Preeclampsia loomed like a cloud, with coma and stroke. The transplant could as easily kill me as save me: infection could ravage me and strike me down, my blood could recoil and revolt, my organs seize and start a rebellion. So many ways to die, other than through my heart. I made Emily list them all for me two weeks ago, go down all of the ways I could die. I had to know. I loved knowing things: it made me stronger, all of the learning.

"Eighteen," she told me, her eyes sighing as she slid her reporter's notebook to me. "There are eighteen ways, May."

"But guess the fuck what. They aren't gonna happen," Miranda snapped, taking the notebook and flinging it out the window. It floated there for a moment, wild and threatening in the wind, refusing to fall, before dropping from sight.

"Nice job, Randa, you killed the notebook," Emily said dryly. "That'll show it!"

We hadn't spoken of it since, the powder keg of my self. Not the girls and I. Not Logan and I. And certainly not Dawn. She was worse than Miranda—Miranda treated anything negative with anger and bluster, as if she could curse it away. Dawn didn't want to hear it. Not one word. Under the strength was still the girl who ran away. But she was here, now, even in the midst of a passion play of Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, even as you see evil in every breath.

Dawn rubbed my toes until they began to tingle with heat. "I know Lee's got some long, involved outing planned tomorrow…but if you want? I can take you on a little spin right now, just around the block?"

"No, it's okay. Just sit here with me," I smiled. I picked at the hem of the blanket. "How's Stace?"

"Starting a war with the USC Song Girls," Dawn said bluntly. "It's a rumble, Dollies versus the fembot fuckstick cheerleaders of Southern Cal. Stacey's going for blood."

I blinked. "Is there a reason for this, uh, war?"

"Yeah. _SI On Campus_ said the Song Girls were the hottest cheerleaders in the country. To stay Stace is enraged puts it _very_ mildly. She's currently planning a mob. She's recruiting Miranda," she said with a smirk.

"Oh, _that_'ll be wise and totally not lead to a felony," I snorted. "What next, she tapping Kristy 'Mussolini' Thomas to organize it all?"

Something secret slipped under Dawn's smile. "Well. She _is_ good at organizing things."

The door opened, and J.D. sprung from her perch on the armchair, practically flying to meet Logan as he came inside. When he entered the living room, he already had her cradled in his arms, scratching her belly and kissing the smooth hairs on her nose.

"Don't you kiss your woman with those lips," Dawn said with a shudder.

"I won't. I'll kiss you instead," he said sweetly, and in the space of a breath, he had swooped in and kissed her cheek.

She yelped, giving him a hard shove. "Seriously! I'm gonna need to shower in Purel now," Dawn shuddered. She got up, giving him another shove. "Do you need anything before I go, May?"

"I'm set," I giggled, watching Logan head up the stairs, sneaking me a wink behind my sister's back. "Have a good night. Be nice to Trick or Treaters."

Dawn snorted. "It's a Friday night, and I'm firmly in rebound territory. I'm gonna get me a hot, sketchy UNC boy and shag him 'til his teeth hurt. I haven't had sex in _months_, thanks to Henry. Time to jump on it."

"Maybe you want…to keep processing it?" I suggested gently. "Let some more time pass before you jump back on the horse. Or boy. Whichever. Henry was the first man you loved, and—"

"And I can either sit around moping, or I can do something fun. Nunning it up does nothing for me. I spent Tuesday night and all of Wednesday crying. We watched the sad movies yesterday. Today…I'm ready to be Dawn again, and Dawn ain't a girl who wallows. She kicks ass. And then taps that ass," she added, sticking her fist in the air.

I shrugged. "Whatever you think you need, Dawnie. But…if you did want to still cry and watch movies—I got a TV in my bedroom, you know…"

She kissed my forehead, then grabbed her bag. "I know, sis. And I love you. I'm not pretending it's all okay, not at all. But I want to have some fun. It's sex, not an engagement ring," Dawn teased, slinging her bookbag over her shoulders.

"Really? Wow, and I thought that's why Logan married me, because we slept together. Oh, misguided me," I moaned, putting my hand to my forehead. My unringed hand, the bands on my left hand too small for my swollen fingers. I missed them. I ached for them.

"Shut up," Dawn laughed. "Have fun with _your_ trick or treaters." She slid to the door and called up the stairs, "Goodnight, dear General, treat my sister right, or I'll hunt you down like a mangy dog!"

"Threat duly noted. See you tomorrow, Dawn," he called back down, each word ringed with a grin. I closed my eyes, listening to the rhythm of the house. Door closing. Closet opening. Drawers slamming. Clothes fluttering down to the ground.

The kick of my foot on the couch. "Was Shawn kidding, that we'd get a billion kids tonight, because you're, you know, 'Number Ten?'"

"We're going to get mobbed, Tess. Don't worry, I picked up some more candy at the drug store," Logan said. The shuffle of steps on the carpet.

"Were you kidding, yesterday? Are you really going to wear a costume for the trick or treaters?" I said, just loud enough for him to hear.

The beat of feet on the stairs. "No?" Logan answered, proudly jumping the last stair, the vampire cape fluttering around him, my husband turned Dracula before my eyes. "I just love Halloween!"

I burst out laughing. "Are you twelve? Really, are you?"

"If I could go house to house, I so would. Let's put aside the fact that Halloween is the double-edged sword for the dentist—I mean, it's basically Death to Healthy Teeth Day…but on the flip side, that means more business," he reasoned, weighing his hands like a scale. "But, come on. For a few hours, you get to put on a costume, pretend that it's someone other than you, _and_ come home with peanut butter cups. Is this heaven or what?"

"No, it's Iowa," I giggled, pulling him down by the cape to sit with me on the couch. We met in a kiss, and I finally pulled back, brushing my fingertips over his cheekbones. "You really liked being someone other than you?"

Logan looked at me and shrugged, his eyes trailing away. I gently touched his face, urging them back to me. "I wasn't exactly someone I was comfortable being, you know? Not until a few years ago. Halloween was nice. It was, like, one whole free day to be anybody but myself. It's kinda why I've always been into costumes. I mean—come on, pretty girl, remember the costumes I wore in eighth grade?"

I grinned despite myself. "A prince…and oh, God, you went as a _Cats_ cat. Oh, _Logan_, I forgot about that!" I snickered, covering my lips with my hand. I kissed him again and rested my forehead against his. "And suddenly, why Dawn perpetuates the idea of you being gay makes a _bit_ of sense."

His eyes widened. "Oh, wow. Yeah. Well. I'm pretty much fucked, aren't I."

"Pretty much," I laughed, hugging him as close as my belly would allow. I let out a small squeak of a breath. "She's kicking," I breathed, grabbing his hand and pressing it to my thickened skin. "She's saying, Hi, Daddy."

"She's saying, Aunt Dawn is a crackhead. And just because Daddy wore a silly costume that his girlfriend wanted to wear, that makes him not gay, but instead a wonderful partner," he said, putting his ear against my stomach.

"Did she say that," I grinned, rubbing his head with the back of my fingers.

"Word for word," Logan promised, laying his lips there. He nodded. "Brilliant child."

"A prodigy," I agreed, curling hearts in the shorn field of his hair. "She'll be building rocket ships by the time she's potty-trained."

He drew stars with his fingertips onto that rise of my body. "I'm expecting she'll be piloting that ship by the time she's seven. Six and a half, maybe."

"Oh, easily. And back in time for crackers and naptime," I nodded. I looked in his eyes, swam in them, anchored myself in them. "Angel…my chest hurts," I whispered. "I didn't tell Dawn—but—it hurts."

Logan urged me to lie flat on my back, and he pushed my shirt up, gathering it under my chin. With the planes of his thumbs, he began kneading into my scars, into the angry emptiness where swollen breasts should be. I let out a small whimper and bit hard on the fleshy place between my thumb and my hand. It _hurt_: you aren't there, stop _hurting_.

Maybe I should say that to the part of me that ached every day for my mother, for Barbara. For my father. _You aren't there, stop it!_ Never works. The imprints of memory for limbs and people so dear, they feel as near as skin. Stop hurting. Be gone. Stop.

"Tell me a story," I managed, gritting my teeth tight.

"What kind of story," he whispered, grinding circles deep into each part of my pain.

"Any. Anything, Logan," I breathed, clenching my eyes tight.

He was quiet for a moment, but then I could almost hear him smile. "Senior year. In May, right after Nick got back from school? And we all went up to Bramford for the day—you and me, Nick and Babs, Randa and Alan, Emily and that guy, what was his name, Tucker? And we played football there in the sand, and Alan came at me like he was trying to tackle me, but I just glared at him, and he practically wet his pants?" he laughed. "And when you caught the ball from Emmy, you couldn't remember where to run, so you started running to the _wrong_ goal, so Emily tackled _you_?"

I began to feel my lips curl in a golden sort of smile. "Yeah. And Randa whined that football wasn't fair to manicures, so she made Alan play for her."

"And Nick chased Babs into the water, and I was yelling that she was out of bounds, but she dragged me into the water, and you jumped on my back, and when you finally let me up for air, you two swore that your team had scored. Twice. Totally legal," he added with a disgusted grunt.

"Sore loser still, huh?" I grinned, opening my eyes.

Logan sniffed. "I believe in fair play, Ms. Baker, thank you."

"Sooore loooser," I sang, tickling his neck. "Tell me the story of the rest of the night."

Logan smiled, and I could see him run through that day in his head. That honey-dipped Friday, the football game, the bonfire on the beach. How Nick and Barbara kissed as though they were running out of kisses, giggling into each other's open mouth, making up for all of the minutes apart. Randa and Alan with their arms around each other in a clumsy, awkward way, the way her eyes shone in the firelight, bright and clever and hesitant, as she glanced over at him. As though she was calculating just how much it would take for her to fall in love with him, if she should. Emily bumping shoulders with her boyfriend, the kisses he landed on the bend of her jaw, a match made somewhere between lust and comfort, something wrapped without strings, just fun.

Me, leaning back against Logan, deep in the hollow of his arms. He would layer kisses along my neck, the curve of my shoulder, my mouth when I would turn to meet his. When I would pull a marshmallow off the fire, he would pull it off, his fingers stick with sweet as he slid each blackened puff into his mouth. I would lick his fingers clean, revel in the taste of sugar and his skin. He could always make eating worth it. Something fun, not scary. Dangerous, but in the good way.

And the bonfire quickly devolved. Soon, Miranda and Alan were sneaking off to the car, and Emily was mumbling about finding more sticks to grill the hot dogs on, tugging her boyfriend's hand impatiently.

"So, I guess it's just the four of us," I grinned, tossing a marshmallow at Barbara.

She giggled. "Do you two want to make up a lame excuse to go off and make out? Or should we just wrestle for who gets the fire?"

"I'm so okay with you and May wrestling for it," Nick laughed, tugging on one of her curls.

"I'm so sure you are," she scoffed, giving him a small push.

Logan rolled a pebble around in his fingers. "There's this new novel concept sweeping the nation—you know, _talking_? We could try that?"

"That sounds one of them things that the young folks are doing. I fear change," I told him solemnly, peering up at his face. I squealed as he buried a raspberry in my neck, my red star-covered side, and I squirmed, tickling his waist until he buckled. We tumbled back, our fingers furiously finding all of the soft spots on each other's body. And Barbara kept yelling out, "Her _knees_, Logan! Come on, get her, under the right arm!"  
"Whose side are you on!" I gasped, rolling onto my back as my boyfriend lifted my shirt and blew his lips into my stomach, making me scream out in giggles.

"The side that has you laughing that hard—oh!" she yelped, as Nick grabbed her and darted to the water. I heard a splash, a squeal, a peal of happiness.

Logan straddled me, tickling my waist one more time. "Wow. Nick should be a psychic. We _did_ end up wrestling for the fire," he said in a breathless voice, and I lost myself in laughter, grabbing him by the shirt collar and tugging him down to me.

Here he was, older, sweeter, more lovely than ever, trying to push all of my hurt away. I wrapped my fingers around the collar of his shirt, the starched fabric crinkling in my fists, and pulled him against my bizarre body. He curved over my stomach, he pressed his cheek against my sternum.

"What is it?" he whispered, tilting up to meet my eyes.

"That was a good story," I murmured. I stroked his head. "_You're_ good."

He smiled into my skin. "That was a good Friday. But this is a good Friday, too. Hey, pretty girl—trick or treat?"

"Treat," I whispered, and I didn't even take in a breath before he kissed me. I knew that I could share his.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

J.D. ran in a lazy circle head of me, tugging a bit on her leash. "Curb," Logan warned, grabbing the armrests of the wheelchair and lifting it up onto the sidewalk.

"Thank you, sir," I laughed, reaching back to rub his hand. He pulled it away, and I knew he was checking his watch for a brief second before his fingers wrapped around the grips again. "Anyway, you were saying?"

He exhaled hard. "Right. It's not that I, like, don't _want_ to, I just—I'm tired of being the grown up, you know? I need some other guys to step up here, especially with the fact that I will have a lot of shit on my plate with my personal life. Everybody's acting like we're all big pimpin' superstars or whatever. Rankings mean jack, you gotta _earn_ it," he stressed.

"Have you talked to Coach about this?" I asked, tilting my head to look at him. I had spent enough time staring at the trees, the grass, the way the earth was curling back in the slow crawl of cooler weather. This was the South, were "autumn" and "winter" were relative, but still, the weather had shifted from the forceful crest of summer humidity to something more gentle. Everything was relaxing now, lush and serene, before the growing stopped in a few weeks. Next to the springtime, this was my favorite time of year.

Logan shrugged. "Yeah? And he tells me that if I keep leading by example, guys will follow. And we might have to fail a bit for them all to appreciate it. Which sucks, you know? I mean, we're _so_ talented, I don't understand why everybody doesn't just sack it up and know that it doesn't happen by magic?"

"Angel, it _has_ happened by magic, for a lot of them," I said. "They've always been the most talented guys in the room. In all of the rooms in the whole county, maybe. They need to learn how to be a team, they need to learn to push themselves…maybe Coach is right, Logan, maybe they just need a game. Maybe not a loss, but not the kind of win that they expect. This is just part of being a freshman. It'll come," I nodded.

"I wasn't like this," he grumbled. "And I swear, my freshman class was a shit ton more humble."

I laughed. "Because none of the freshmen were going to start, other than Shawn, so everybody had something huge to prove, you told me that. And, my love, my sweet Logan, my darling husband who I adore—"

"—Oh, God, what."

"—you have never ever been what I'd call 'easy-going' on the basketball court," I finished, breaking into laughter. "I don't think you get to be the control group here."

"I'm hurt and offended by your accurate use of the truth," Logan said, tugging on my scarf.

"I play dirty pool," I grinned, tipping my head back to look at him. "I'm sorry that you're such an easy target."

Logan laughed, leading us down a driveway ramp so that we could cross Franklin and head back on our block. He sucked in some air. "I know you don't agree with me, pretty girl, but I…I want to stay involved, work out with the team, practice with them…but I think I should redshirt from competition. Really."

"I told you, I want your life to stay normal. You being normal makes me feel more steady," I shot back, twisting my head to give him a hard look.

He held up a hand. "Mary Anne, I'm not saying that I'm going to drop out of school, okay? Just that I won't play. And I've talked it out with Coach, he's the one that has been pushing it, since a half-focused point guard does shit for him. Besides. I love Sharon to pieces, but…I want to raise my daughter from day one, not be the supervisor while she does the ground work, you know?"

"This isn't what I wanted," I said, shaking my head. No. One of us has to be normal.

Logan leaned down to look at me. "Pretty girl, we don't get what we want," he said quietly. "But—hey. Maybe we get these kinds of things because we need them to be us." He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand and kissed my neck. "I want to redshirt. This might not be what you want, and what we wanted with our great plans—but it's what I want right now. Please."

His face was a map of every good I had ever known. Looking at him was looking into a well of empathy, reflecting back everything I wanted in me. The strongest faith in the world, the heart wider than all oceans. Eyes deeper than roses. Somewhere I had never traveled, but I knew like the back of my own heart. I lifted his left hand and kissed the gold band there; it tasted metallic and sweet all at once. "I understand. It's okay with me," I agreed. I dipped my head a bit. "God, it just sucks, though. I never wanted you to give it up."

"Hey. I'm not. I'm still gonna train and everything with them…I can travel with them, Coach says I can run practices and everything. I just don't play," he shrugged. "He's been trying to get me to say yes since August. He thinks this is right, and so do I. Everyone does, even the team," he added. "We're a family, and you're a part of it. You come first, Tess. You do."

"Except with me. You kinda get top billing with me, angel," I said, tracing a heart on his cheek. "I love you, husband, so much."

He grinned, kissing my nose and straightening back up. "I had a feeling that might be the case," he said, checking the time again.

I peered back at him. "Logan, that's the fifth time you've checked your watch. What, is your other pregnant wife expecting you soon?"

"No, there's a game on at five-thirty that I don't want to miss," he shrugged. He kissed the top of my head. "I love you, but…it's football season, _tesorina_. We gotta keep things in perspective," he nodded.

"Lovely," I drawled, rolling my eyes so hard, my brow bone ached. "Well, far be it from me to keep you from your one true love."

Logan gave me a smug smile. "Now, that's why I married you. You know where you stand, and you accept it."

"That's me, the little woman, barefoot, pregnant, and keeping her pretty little mouth shut when it's game day," I said, my voice flat, as I battled back a smile.

He lifted the wheelchair onto the sidewalk. Logan curled his fingers. "Stand up, oh perfect wife. C'mon," he urged, stepping in front of me and helping me heave my unbalanced body to my feet. Carefully, he maneuvered behind me and then sat in the chair, pulling me down in his wake. I giggled, settling back against his body, curling a hand around his face; he was so solid and strong, for a moment, all of the weakness in my limbs melted away, and the heat of his health baked me into something whole.

With an easy push, he sent us coasting down the sidewalk. "I still love Allegra for a name. We can call her Allie. A-l-l-i-e or A-l-y or A-l-l-y. I am not a fan of A-l-i, I'll always want to call her Ali Baba," he grinned, giving my pink scarf a tug before pushing again.

I looked at him and inhaled, the warm autumn air giving my lungs a heavy feel. I would miss this, being in the hospital for weeks. Take it all in now. "Maybe…we shouldn't name her after anyone. I get this feeling Barbara doesn't want us to. Maybe she shouldn't have the burden of someone else's memories, what _those_ people meant to us, even if it's all love." Licking my lips once, I offered, "I was thinking…Isabelle."

Logan frowned slightly. "Isabelle? Where'd that come from?"

My smile felt brighter than seven sunrises when I said, "Where did you fall in love with me."

"Which time?" he teased, touching his nose to mine as we crawled to a stop in front of our house. He twisted us into the driveway and sent us rolling to the garage, where he stopped the chair and put on the brake. His face, though, grew slack, honeyed over with memory. "The carillon at Stoneybrook University," Logan said in a hush, pulling back a bit.

"I am sound, I will ring out like bells," I whispered, threading my fingers with his. "I want her to know that she is beloved. That she's not just the 'match baby.' She's everything that moment in the bell tower pointed to."

The first time I _chose _to kiss you. The first time I really believed that you were a different man. The first time I felt radiant and strong and bigger than my body, a feeling that I tapped into so many times when I was sick. The first time I wanted you. Again.

He nodded, his smile spreading over every part of his body; even his hands felt happy in mine. "Isabelle. Isabella? I think that sounds better with my last name," he said. Logan chewed on the inside of his cheek. "We need a middle name, still."

"There's always 'Miranda,'" I grinned, and he laughed, his eyes turning a brighter blue as he basketed me in his arms and started us to the backyard. "Or, you know, Batman."

"Oh, yeah, ol' Batman Bruno. She's a real go-getter. Holy doomed childhood, Batman," Logan laughed, resting his chin on my belly. As we reached the sliding doors, he balanced me carefully and knocked on the glass.

I frowned at him, keeping my lips tight and pursed as he kissed me once, twice. "Why…did you knock?" I said slowly, peering at him. I reached up and pushed his glasses up his nose. I pulled them off of his face and slipped them on mine, squinting through the blur that he became. "It's not the Batcave—well, not yet. What's with the mystery here?"

Suspicious. His smile grew wider. He was the one for grand gestures. What was he up to? Before I could press harder, the door began to slide open. Logan took his glasses back and then yanked on my scarf, pulling it over my eyes. "Logan!" I squealed, trying to pull it back as he stepped inside the house. "What are you doing?"

"Being on time, aren't I?" I heard him say as I pulled the scarf off. As I rubbed my bald head, I narrowed my eyes at him, but as I opened my mouth, someone else spoke.

"No, actually, it's five-thirty-_one_, Logan, and that makes you late," a familiar crisp voice sighed. "You'd think, by now, you'd understand the meaning of _on time_." The girl spoke in a way that commanded each letter. As if she had the rights to every word. As if she was made to rule the world. Or at least her little corner of it.

_Kristy_.

I whipped my head over to the living room, but I couldn't see her. There were too many people: Dawn, Miranda, Emily. Stacey. Kerry and Hunter and Rose and Jeff. Jessi. Erin and Jeremy. Jenny and Marissa and three other of my good girlfriends from Duke. Eddie. Dr. Paves. All of them, surrounded in a wonderland of pink crepe paper and balloons, the kind of decorations that are so tacky and omnipresent, you can't help but smile at them. The word _Baby _spelled out in cardboard toy blocks, arching over the living room windows. Gigantic, manically grinning storks—okay, those were a bit creepy. And there, there was Kristy, perched in a director's chair near the couch, giving Dawn a grin before giving Logan a hard look.

"Well?" she prodded, tapping her watch.

"Okay, now you're taking it too far," Stacey said, rolling her eyes.

"Taking it too far, _Mussolini_," I heard Miranda mutter.

Dawn sprung up. "So!" she said in an overly bright voice. "Welcome to your baby shower!"

Logan carried me to an empty armchair, settling me down with the gentleness of feathers, and there were so many hands quick to put pillows around my body, drape me in blankets and fold them back perfectly. Kerry gave my hand a squeeze, her eyes shining like nickels. I felt so overwhelmed, breath danced right out of me. All of these people…here for me. For us, I thought, resting my hands on my stomach and staring at everyone.

"Don't cry," Rose smiled, wiping my eyes with a pink checked napkin.

Emily giggled, crossing her legs under her on the couch. "Oh, that's like asking Miranda to be nice to her sister. Not gonna happen."

"It's true. On both counts. Just go and cry, Ophelia," Jeremy grinned, raising up a drink that looked suspiciously like champagne. Oh, boy. It would be _that_ kind of night.

I tried to find my words, but they slipped out like sand. _How_, I mouthed, looking at everyone, their faces so blurry and damp.

"It originated with Dawn, germinated amongst us Carolina pals, and then blossomed under the tutelage of a certain outsider," Erin explained, crossing her legs under her as Jeremy gave her a nudge. Oh, Erin, no wonder Keshawn is intimidated.

Tucking her bob behind both ears, Dawn blushed a bit, and I had to force myself not to gape. Dawn, blushing? First her falling in love, then the way she held us close after her breakup—and now modesty? From Dawn "I'm Awesome" Schafer?

We all have to grow up, don't we, I thought, my hand curling into a fist at the base of my throat. I love you, sis, so much I can't even find arms wide enough to hold it.

Stacey rubbed Dawn's back as my sister shrugged. "I know that you wanted to see everybody…and everyone totally wanted to see you. I thought about it back in August…but…you were having a bad month, and I needed some help—so—"

"Call one number, save time," Jessi laughed, nodding at Kerry as she took a tray of cookies from the girl. "Kristy is quite experienced."

Kristy flipped her hair over her shoulder. It dangled down to her collarbones, curling slightly at the ends. She looked like she had gained ten pounds around her hips and thighs, a luscious padding that gave her a softness on the outside that she so often kept hidden inside. For so long, we were best friends. I guess the childish part of me thought we always would be.

I mean, here I was, married to the first and only boy I had ever loved, my heart sewed to his since I was thirteen. I was still best friends with a girl that I met when I was still in pigtails. And I was close to another girl from that time, too. But it was the one who knew me from babyhood, who walked so I could follow, who blazed trails so I would know where I was supposed to go, who I didn't have in my life now, except for the cursory hello when Dawn was on the phone with her.

Yet here she was, readjusting the barrette that held half of her hair back in a severe way from her square-jawed face, giving me the same smile she did when we were just little girls and I was scared and needed that smile to soften the exasperated tone that would say, _Come on, Mary Anne._ But I wasn't going to follow her anymore. And that was okay. It was nice, though, to know that even though we would never be MaryAnneandKristy, best friends forever, we could find each other sometimes.

I smiled back at her as she said, "I was happy to do it," she said with a flippant roll of her hand. "I was bored after my internship ended, coordinating this was my pleasure. It was kinda child's play. And everyone could make it, except Sharon, but she'll be here soon enough. So easy, really, May."

I could hear a grumble building up inside of Miranda, the way I used to hear the words Kristy would say before they came out of her mouth. The ears that only a best friend can have. My eyes landed on Stacey. "Don't you—aren't you waging war on girls who sing?" I managed.

"It's a bye week for the football team," Stacey said with a shrug. "I have a very capable corporal, she's carrying on the fight against the skanks from the south."

"I'm glad to know that your education is serving you so well," Jessi said, tightening her mouth as her eyes smiled.

Stacey nodded, her eyes taking on a hint of steel that chilled me deep below my bones. "Economics is a study in ruthlessness and efficiency. I'll bring those pom-pom pu—"

"Crackers, Mary Anne?" Dr. Paves said loudly, giving Stacey a glare. "Something to drink?"

Eddie leaned forward and waved his hand at Dr. Paves. "Shh, Ana, I wanted to hear where she was going. Your command of profanity is truly amazing, Stacey."

"Moving on," Kristy said firmly.

"Yeah, moving on," I said, eyeing Stacey suspiciously. Let's keep that ruthless profanity inside. Because if Stacey got going, Miranda would take it as a call to open season, then Emily would tag team with her on Kristy, then there would be a catfight with Kerry ripping out Miranda's hair just for the hell of it and Dawn making things worse by interjecting her unsolicited opinion, Dr. Paves analyzing it and mentally writing a paper on social dynamics while Jeff and Eddie silently and secretly hoped for it to go to the Cinemax place. The Dookies would slink away, except for Erin and Jeremy who loved dirty dealings and would make themselves popcorn for the show, while Rose hummed to herself in a forced oblivion. And poor Jessi…well, she'd just be stuck.

Oh, dear God. Please, let the worst thing that happens here be toilet paper dresses or whatever the hell embarrassing thing you do at baby showers. Or is that wedding showers? Whatever. Just no blood.

Logan finished giving his mother a hug and reached out to ruffle Hunter's hair. "So, okay, me and Hunt and Jeff are gonna go hit BW3s. Eddie, did you want to come?"

"Actually? Yeah, that would be great. I love you, Mary Anne, but—" He winced. "I don't want to have a toilet paper dress."

Dr. Paves let out an aggravated sigh. "For the twentieth time, Eddie, that's at _wedding showers_."

"Whatever. My girl knows, breakfast is on me," he said, giving me a wink, and I grinned back at him. Hell yeah it was. He nodded at Jeremy, who was happily pouring Miranda a flute full of champagne. "Did you want to come with?"

"Hell no. This is girls' night," Jeremy scoffed. "I'm in my element."

Hunter's head snapped up to look at Logan, who quickly clapped his hands together. "So, okay, we'll be back later." With his awkward, too large for his arms hands—puppy hands, speaking to how tall he would be, too—Hunter leaned on the armrest and gave me a dry kiss on the cheek.

"Bye, Hunt," I smiled, rubbing his fingers.

Jeff shuffled a bit lamely next to the chair, and I tipped my chin up at him. We're cool, brother. We are. He took my eyes and held them tight with his, a half-grin shading his face. Yes, we are. "We'll clean up when we get back," he offered.

"Speak for your damn self," Eddie laughed, and the four guys headed out of the living room, Logan pausing and touching his fingers to his lips, and I touched my hand to my belly again, tracing his initials into my skin. A redness crept in his skin, as if I had breathed into him, and he ducked his head as the long line of him disappeared behind the brother who was his darker, shorter shadow.

I rested my hands on our baby, the reason this room was filled with people I missed and loved and took in an excited breath. "So, okay, if not toilet paper dresses…then what?"

"Though, when you and Logan do your 'real' wedding," Kristy said with air quotes, "that's coming to you in spades, Mary Anne, be warned."

Emily blinked, and I could almost see the volcano of a retort in her. I knew: she was pissed that she hadn't planned this, and there it was, the bubble of anger that _Kristy Freakin' Thomas_ wouldn't be planning _anything_ if she wasn't a member of the _fucking_ wedding party, _Dawn_, but there it also was—her swallowing it down. The difference between her and Miranda. I winked at her, and she twisted her mouth a bit at me, a line somewhere between a smile and a wry sigh.

"At least we'll do the ribbon bouquet, right?" Rose asked, crossing her legs as she leaned forward on one of the dining room benches. "You have to do that. And saving all the wrapping paper, for the baby book."

Stacey sighed. "We wanted to do the Lucky Balloon game? But Jeremy and Erin and I figured out, it was too much of a probability crap shoot to be fair. You could corrupt the sample too easily."

"I love it when you talk math," Jeremy said in a breathless voice.

Jessi peered at the two of them and shook her head. "I just wasn't a fan of the big noises. Sixteen balloons going off? I got wussy, sorry."

Kerry was still holding hard to my hand, rooting me to my new sister. Her face was pink and happy, and I wanted to hold her so close and wrap her in this moment, where she was open and gentle, like she was when she was singing into the wind as Log and I drove her home. I wondered if she and Jeff had talked… "Yeah, not so much," she snorted. "Dawn really liked the game where you break into pairs, and one person puts five clothespins on her body while the other person is blindfolded and has to find the pins?"

"And I said, Hell no, nobody feels me up unless we're both eighteen and in the back of a Camaro, got it?" Dr. Paves said, slashing the air in front of her throat.

As the others laughed, Dawn held up a finger. "But I remembered a game that was at Carol the Evil Bitch's shower?" she said, so cheerily that I winced. Carol, the cheater who her father had forgiven, who plied Jeff with gifts that he constantly threw away. I watched my Duke friends frown in confusion, and I mouthed, _Stepmother_, and the girls nodded. Ah, yes, the usual familial monster. "And it was total fun. The Baby Food Game."

"It's an above average one," Kristy agreed.

"And I'm totally hungry. It's a bonus," Miranda nodded.

"We have another game, too, the biggie, but this is a good warm up," Dawn said, standing up. "Okay. Lemme get the baby food. See, we all have to take a bit and guess what kind it is."

Erin sighed. "It's all fruits and vegetables, isn't it. They never have chocolate or booze flavors, do they."

"Right, the ever popular Rum'n'Coke flavor," Emily snarked, grinning at Erin as she settled down at my feet, giving my swollen ankles a rub. "I know Logan's stocking up on that one."

"Yeah, my brother's a real lush," Kerry giggled.

"It's really hard to pry him away from the liquor. You should really talk to him, Rose," I said solemnly, unwinding my hand from Kerry's for a moment to retie my scarf on my head.

Rose began to laugh, her mouth opening to say something as the doorbell rang. Miranda leapt up and shrugged a bit as she ducked into the foyer. A moment later, an abbreviated arm poked out and waved, the stump curling coyly. I gasped in excitement as Allison burst into the room, Kathleen bouncing behind her. "No way!" I exclaimed.

"Yes way, our flight from New York got delayed, sorry," Allison said, letting her tongue loll out with annoyance.

"Hi, May! Oh, my gosh, you're so—_pregnant_," Kathleen gasped, clapping her hands together.

I pressed my hands to my belly. "Yes, I am," I whispered, smiling at the girl.

Hello, baby. I love you.

Save me.

"Sean and Flynn wanted to come, but she's not feeling too great," Allison said, plopping down on the floor near Erin, her camera resting in her lap. "She's fine," she added quickly, "but she didn't think a weekend full of activity would be the most awesome idea."

"She's okay," I repeated, exhaling a bit when Allison and Kathleen nodded firmly. This was how it would always be. Every cold, every temperature, every unbalanced breath, we'd all worry. Even Kathleen, her face round and sweet and alive as she hugged Miranda and Emily hello—even she could be sick, too. We were living as if we were dying. Some of us more literally than others.

Dawn came back into the room, and Allison grabbed a jar, poking her finger in it. "Oh, the pears taste better now," she said happily, getting another lick.

"How do you know that they taste _better_," Stacey asked, raising an eyebrow. She gave Allison a small smile, and Allison grinned back. They had made peace—I knew Allison wanted more. But, that's not how it happens, and the two girls settled back into their own spaces.

Allison shrugged. "I got really high once with this girl in my studio, Cass? And we had some massive munchies, and the pizza was taking forever to get there, and all we could find was baby food in the meantime so—" She stopped and stared, bug-eyed at Rose. "—so, this was all made up and in my imagination, the end," she said hastily.

Rose looked at Kerry. "No," was all she said.

"Don't worry," Kerry mumbled, scooting a bit closer to her mother.

"Watch it, Judgey McBruno," Dawn said simply, passing out a jar to each person. "I'm only saying it once, but—embrace a bit of your brother, huh? He's a patient guy." She looked at Kristy and rolled her eyes, a crooked smile arching across her face. "And I know, who ever thought I'd say that about ol' Lee."

Stacey took a jar filled with a dark green mush, her brow creasing in surprise, looking at me with a triumphant light in her eyes. "You've been saying this kind of stuff all week, Sunshine, I'm beginning to wonder if your breakup didn't lead to a head injury."

"Dawn likes Logan now?" Kerry whispered to me.

I began stirring my own jar, filled with a butterscotch colored goo. I was going to feed this to my child? And not as a punishment? "I guess so," I smiled. I looked at Dr. Paves and held up my jar, and the joke I was about to make about Werthers' Originals caught in my throat. My eyes went to water again as I looked at this woman that had guided my conscience through darkness for years. She was my other Sharon. I wanted to bury my face in her neck and hold tight. Mother me, too.

She tilted her head and stared back. _You can do it on your own. But I'll walk next to you, if you want. Not for you. But with you._ The lines between us blurred and disappeared. Therapist and patient. Friends. Loved ones. I had two like-mothers in this room, and another due soon. The air was thick with blessings. I looked at her and sighed out a heavy breath as her mouth melted into a knowing smile.

"A Werthers' would make this go down so much easier," she said simply.

"I bet so," I said, and I accepted the napkin again from Rose to wipe my eyes. _I miss you_, I mouthed.

A tear slipped out of her eye, and I remembered the feel of my mittened hands clutching hers as I screamed out in pain. My father wasn't there, but she was, telling me that I could do it. Like she had for years, like she would for years after.

I could do this.

My belly felt heavier than it ever had, crushing everything in my body, my mind, my air. Oh, my—

Oh, my—

The jar of butterscotch that was not butterscotch tumbled to the ground. I clenched my eyes shut.

"—and the guy, he—May?" Emily said abruptly.

"May?" "Mary Anne?" "Sweetheart?" "Sis?" "May?" The names were pinning me down, oh, what was this ripping feeling in my body, oh—

"Kerry, call your brother, like, now," someone said sharply. Stacey. No, Dawn.

No—yes?

The pain stopped, but my breath felt a mile away.

"Is it her cancer?" A whisper. "Oh, my God, it's the baby, something's wrong." A panicked hiss.

A pair of hands rested on my face, and my eyes opened. The warm blue eyes that looked so much like my angel's floated in front of me. "In your belly, like you're being crushed and stabbed and yanked at all at once?" Rose asked quietly.

I nodded.

"Should we call an ambulance?" Miranda said, a jagged note tearing down her voice.

Rose kissed my cheek. "Kerry, call Logan. Dawn, I need you to get your car, we won't need an ambulance." She grinned at me and began helping me to my feet, and when I looked in her face, I could recognize something that only she and I could see: the mother inside the lines of our face.

"I'm having my baby," I said, clutching her hands.

"You bet your ass you are," Rose said, and the sound of my pulse beat in my ears, my heart hammering, counting each second that I stood on my unsteady feet, breath held, as if I had just plunged underwater and never expected to surface again.

What happens when all you've ever wanted is about to come true?

I closed my eyes again and felt like I was leaning over a birthday cake full of candles, ready to make my wish. This is my pulse, hear it:

I want to live.

I want to live.

I want to live.

My hands touched my belly, and I could feel the earthquake underneath my fingers. She was coming.

I want _you_ to live.

I blinked. I held my breath, and my heart had never sounded so loud.


	36. Chapter 33

Jackie Rowdowsky blew blast me, and I let out a cry as I began to fall.

But a pair of arms darted out and wrapped around my body, cradling me as I tumbled down. I looked up, my mouth opening to say something but all my words evaporated there on my tongue, rising up like steam as I stared at him. Upside down, like a fun house mirror, my eyes looking right into his mouth.

Those were lips that would kiss me soon after.

Those were lips that would call me _pretty girl_ and _tesorina_ and wife.

But all I knew then was that Logan caught me as I was falling. He smiled at me with his crooked grin and said in a Southern-warm, slow way of his: "Don't worry, I have you."

Yes, he did.

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"Do you need another pillow, May?"

"Do you want some socks?"

"Want me to turn on the TV?"

"Do you want me to call Logan again?"

If one more person spoke, I was going to scream.

Wait, check that: that ripping, kicking, nasty line ache that arched through my pelvis came again, and I let out a howl through my gritted teeth.

Close enough.

I looked at my sister with desperate eyes. _Get them all out of here, for God's sake._ Every single member of my baby shower was crammed in the bright, boxy hospital room, presents cuddled in their arms. It had been a blast of Great Idea from Kristy.

"You might be in labor for hours. _Days_. So why should we stop the party?" she reasoned.

"Days?" I whimpered to Dr. Paves as she helped me into my coat.

"It'll be character building," she said, her eyes heavy with a smirk.

"You go to Seattle and come back Sarah Silverman," I glared, leaning against the wall and forcing myself to breathe. Those classes: all Logan did was sit there and hold my hands and make fun of having to take a class to breathe. _How hard is it?_ he had hissed. There, trying to remember to stay standing while my insides felt crunched and baked by this baby that was half his, actually, Logan, breathing can be _very hard_.

It was easier, now, lying down in the hospital bed, but all of the noise and heat from body crammed together in the small space of the room was making me feel claustrophobic under my skin. Jessi was showing Kathleen and Kerry how to do a pirouette by the tiny bathroom in the hospital room, my new sister stared in awe. Kathleen held her arms out carefully and tried to imitate the spin, crashing into Miranda.

"Watch it, fly girl," Miranda said sharply, stepping on Emily's foot. Who howled so loudly that Jeremy squealed which made Stacey laugh so loudly that my ears started to echo with the noise, all of the noise, and then Dawn came in, her voice raking down my nerves like fingernails, and trilled, "I have cake!"

I burst into tears.

It had worked for me in the past, you know.

Dawn stared at me and then said again in that so loud it shattered me voice, "Which is gonna be in the visitor's room? How 'bout we move down there?"

"Sounds perfect," Stacey and Emily said in unison.

"May? Want me to stay?" Miranda asked, putting her hand on my thick ankle. It felt like weeks since I had seen that part of my body, lost under the sea of my belly. God knows what color nail polish Stacey had put down there. Maybe she had branded me, like one of her Chanel bags. What if there was a Stanford Cardinal on my foot?

I shook my head. "I just…need some time to think," I said, exhaling with my mouth in a puckered circle. My fingers curled around her wrist. "Do I have a tattoo on my foot?"

Miranda looked at me suspiciously then glanced at Emily. "Has she gotten drugs?"

"Come on," Emily urged her, though she gave me an appraising look. "Text us, we'll come running. And if you want us to thin the crowd—"

"We'll just encourage Stacey to tell us what's hot and what's not. Good times, a lecture on jorts versus denim capris," Miranda snorted, grabbing her purse. She gave me a kiss on the cheek. "We're right outside. Love you, Maybelle."

"I love you," I whispered. "I just need the quiet."

I kissed Emily on the cheek. "We know," she said with a wink. Of course they did.

The room was empty save for the two adult women, and I felt like my lungs could inflate all the way—well, as much as they could with the baby and its version of manifest destiny. I was certain she had her feet crammed up in my diaphragm, a prenatal yoga of her very own that crowded every inch of me. Were you supposed to feel this tight, like a present wrapped with too little paper, taped together desperately? Like my skin was ready to rip apart if I flexed my fingers too wide?

"Is it hot in here?" I asked, my eyes meeting Rose's as she opened up the curtains in the room.

She strode over and put her hand on my forehead. I was hooked up to machines measuring each tick and breath of me, but my mother-in-law pressed her skin to mine, and it felt like the most accurate barometer in the world. "You feel a bit warm, but it's nothing to get worried about. Just stress," she said in a sweet voice, sitting down on the edge of the bed. With a furtive glance towards the door, she grabbed my chart and looked it over.

Dr. Paves sat in the chair next to my bed, taking one of my hands in hers. "Everything look normal?"

Rose nodded slowly, flipping through the pages. "I've been nosing around, finding out how they treat preeclampsia during labor," she murmured, squinting the way Logan did when he was reading without his glasses. The same wrinkle over their nose, the same tightness of the eyes. I missed him so badly for a moment, my heart seemed to skip right into the next moment, a moment closer to him coming. I felt cloying and needy—unable to wait even fifteen minutes or him to show, when did I become That Girl?—but I was scared and felt crushed under the weight of this. I wanted my husband, that was all.

"—right, Mary Anne?" Rose was prompting.

"Pardon?"

"You have a twenty-four hour window for a vaginal birth, right, honey?" she said, maybe for the second time. Maybe third.

I nodded, and the hand that was in mine was so strong, so secure, I began to cry. This is what a mother would feel like.

Where was Sharon…

Where was my father.

"_Mija_, what's wrong," Dr. Paves murmured, stroking her fingers down the swollen track of my arm.

I started shaking my head, so fast the room blurred over. The room took on a strobed look in my eyes, as unreal as this seemed. "I'm _twenty_. I'm sick, and I'm married, and I'm gonna have a baby that I might not live long enough to teach her to tie her shoes? Was I insane? Am I insane?" I cried, covering my face with a hand. "What am I doing? I dragged Logan into this, I dragged this baby into this, my father isn't speaking to me…I dream about my mother, and I read my dreams like Tarot cards—I'm a mess, I can't believe this is happening, I can't…"

Dr. Paves watched me cry, her hand tight on mine. She waited for my tears to space out, so that there was more silence than sobbing. "What do you want me to say?" she asked me in a low voice. "That…you've fucked up? Good job, Ms. Whatever Last Name You Are, you did a royal number on you and Too Tall and everyone around you. Is that what you want?"

"No," I gulped, rubbing at my eyes. "I can do that just fine, thank you."

She smiled at me. "So. What you want is…oh dear God, it's been so long, I've almost missed it. Mary Anne wants validation!"

"Don't make fun of me," I snapped, pulling my hand back and crossing my arms over my chest. What a smart ass. I had forgotten that about her. Thanks for reminding me, _Ana_.

She shrugged, mimicking my petulant pose, mischief making her eyes brighten around the edges. "Don't make fun of _you_, Mary Anne. When you say that you 'can't,' that everything is a disaster, you belittle yourself and your ability to make things right."

I put my hands on my belly, round like a map of the world. "But this isn't freaking out over a nightmare. This is—"

"It's huge. Literally," she said dryly. She leaned her arms on the bed and looked at me, a long stare that speared deep inside my most elusive, trembling parts. "But it's nothing you can't handle. There is nothing in the world that's too big of a fight. When it comes to life, that is. I think you're a bit up the creek if you tried to take on one of your boy's teammates for a little fist fight," she teased. Dr. Paves sat back, and I counted the lines in her face, aged and carved squiggles around her eyes. "But this is something that you chose, and when you did? It became your path. Now it's not a question of it 'being' right. _Make_ it right. Make it okay, got me?"

I nodded meekly, and she clucked her tongue, pushing up and joining me on the bed. "I'm just scared," I whispered, hugging my belly with my hands.

"I know," she whispered back. "If you weren't scared, _then_ I'd freak out. A little pep talk before you shove something the size of a microwave is okay. I think you get two or three pep talks, Mary Anne, free of charge."

My brow raised; if I had the hair for eyebrows, I'm certain they would have shot up like arrows. "A _microwave_? Either you know of some seriously tiny ones, or you are overestimating the size of the kid," I giggled.

"Well, I was going to say 'toaster oven,' but I didn't know if kids nowadays had them," she sniffed. "Personally, I adore mine. I can make little pizzas out of English muffins. It's fabulous."

I stared at her incredulously and began to snort with laughter, leaning back in relief and feeling some of that awful pancaked feeling from my chest release. I was still too tight, but it was a bit better. I had enough room to keep breathing.

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"You want to what?" Logan repeated, staring at me in dismay. Abject shock, as though I had slapped him. Or stripped naked. At thirteen, that would have been enough to rock him back on his heels, too.

"I want to dress up as cats, like from the musical?" I repeated, biting at my lower lip and looking at him from the bottom of my eyes. I let my long hair fall over my shoulders, and I stared at him. And I kissed him, a long hard press that made my fingers curl in his hand. We had been kissing for a few weeks now, but this was new, to kiss like lips were malleable.

There. There was a change. His lips were opening, pulling mine apart, too. The gentle, clumsy crawl of his tongue into my mouth, bumping against my teeth. I swallowed, unsure of what to do.

_Don't move._

Okay.

It was nudging mine, now, that hesitant tongue, and I waited for it to blanket mine as I tried to figure out my next move. I hadn't pushed him away, I hadn't screamed or thrown my soda at him, so maybe that shot courage through Logan's veins, because he was scooting closer to me and putting a hand behind my head. He exhaled through his nose against my skin, a vaguely equine noise. I could tell: he had no clue was he was doing, sliding his tongue over mine like a knife spreading peanut butter on bread, but he was so eager, so full of want.

I lifted my tongue and let it curl with his, and Logan wound his hand tighter in my hair. The first time you French kiss is like the first time you hold hands, so nervous about how fingers weld together. Whose wrist is turned forward and whose is turned back. But you find a way to make that pact of hands. And you find a way to make tongues talk in this wordless way.

It just takes practice.

I pulled back first, needing to breathe. My hand was bracing on his shoulder as I took in tiny pants, staring at how my lip gloss had left a red rim around his lips. As if Logan had been sloppy with strawberries or cherry Kool-Aid.

"Wha—what were we talking about?" he said, husky and befuddled.

"Halloween," I murmured, swallowing and tasting him, the Sprite he had been drinking, the mint of his toothpaste. "Costumes."

Logan blinked. "Cats are fine," he mumbled, leaning forward and laying those lips on mine again. I had a fleeting thought: _Oh, your lips will be so red now_.

Oh, how I wanted them to be. Branded by me.

This is why it was smart for my father to never let Logan be inside when Dad wasn't home. Because the first day that I learned how to kiss like this—I never wanted to be kissed any other way.

By any other one.

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"Stacey says that we should have May's shower? That way, you can avoid the bullshit of having to be excited over every damn pair of baby shoes," Allison announced, her camera dangling around her neck. "Direct quote, by the way. Except I redacted a few 'fuckings' here and there."

"The future of American finances," Dr. Paves said dryly, choosing a card of the discard pile.

"I thought Stacey was one of the babysitters," Rose said, her face puzzled, shuffling the cards in her hand around as she chose a card. "I'd think that would be something Randa would say, not Stacey."

"Stacey has a low threshold for stupidity," I explained, examining my own hand before taking the four of spades Rose had tossed down. "Squealing ad naseum over pink items that she might find unfashionable? That might push her over the edge."

Logan let out a snort, picking up my discarded eight. "Sucks to be Stacey, and sucks to be all y'all. Gin," he said triumphantly, laying down his cards over my legs.

"Shouldn't you let Mary Anne win?" his mother asked, tossing one of her cards at him.

I heard a vague click come from near the door; when I looked at Allison, she winked at me. "When do I get to see pictures of your show, from August," I asked, leaning back in the bed. The next contraction was due any minute, like one of Logan's teammates who showed up on football mornings, loud and obnoxious and carrying a case of beer. Right on time to ruin my day.

"I have them back at the house. When you and baby are back home, we'll have a show and tell," Allison smiled, lining Dr. Paves's hands shuffling the deck up in her lens. She fired off three shots and lowered the Canon. "I brought you some artwork, mine and some of the other artists. I also brought pink shit," she added with a sly grin.

I laughed, reaching out a hand to Logan. It was coming, I wanted to be prepared. He gripped hard to my fingers and let his head bob in a way that was determined and conciliatory all at once. When he kissed my fingertips, it felt like a song.

The moment he burst into the hospital room, I wanted to cry. Literally: I was in the thrall of a contraction. Which, if you think about it, is an odd word for what it is; the rhetorician in me seized on that quirk and throttled it to get me through the pain. In grammar, a contraction jams two words together. In birth—slamming that baby against me in its quest to escape—wasn't that was it was, too? The painful joining of two things.

Or maybe the pain was making me delusional.

I was thinking about _rhetoric_ for God's sake. Give me the drugs.

"Tess?" he yelped, hurrying in as I let out a high-pitched whine, clawing at Dr. Paves's hand at a way that gave me déjà vu. His eyes blanked for a moment, and he stared at me as if I was a new person, a stranger with a Mary Anne face who was making a _very_ un-Mary Anne noise.

Logan held up a bag. "I—brought wings?"

I stared at him.

"Do you have parmesan garlic?" Dr. Paves asked eagerly, reaching out for the bag.

I swatted at her. "Ana! Focus!" I demanded. With an exasperated breath, I grabbed a few of the ice chips from the bucket Rose held and crunched them under my teeth to make my mouth moist again. "You," I said, narrowing my eyes at Logan. "_You_."

"We'll…go," Rose offered, grabbing the bag from Logan's hand and hustling out of the room with Dr. Paves.

My gaze was narrowed, a squinting, suspicious thing. But he grinned at me, glancing from my stomach to my face and waving in for a kiss that would me knocked me off my feet, had I been able to stand. Damn this boy and the way he holds me in his mercy with a simple kiss. I laughed into his mouth, and he pulled back. "We're gonna have a baby."

"I'm glad you figured that out," I giggled, tugging on his ears. "Yes, we are."

Logan climbed onto the bed and stretched out next to me. "I stopped by the house and got some stuff for you. Your wooly socks, a sweater if you get chilly…" He traced his finger in a heart over my belly. "The blanket."

"Books?" I prodded.

"We have TV!" Logan protested. He rested his chin on my shoulder. "It's a Saturday. That means _football_."

"That means, have fun in the lounge with the baby shower," I shot back, rubbing my palm over the peach fuzz on his scalp. I sighed. "Stay with me?"

"Even when Randa tried to drag me out by the ears so that you and her and Em can have 'girl time?' Even if Dawn and Stacey want to bombard you with fashion shit?" he asked, his eyes lighting up.

"Especially then," I nodded, kissing him myself, then guiding his head to rest on my heart. "The doctor wants to talk to us. There's a lot to go over."

He turned his face to look at me. "Yeah. But we'll be okay. Dr. Chaplin'll guide us right, she has the whole way. Is it okay if I tell my friends that we're here? Coach?"

"Just…have them go to the lounge? I don't know how up for company I'll be," I said hesitantly. "I'm going to need Dawn to be a stingy gatekeeper for me. Since—you aren't allowed to leave me for a second." I tugged his collar. "Not even for the space of a blink. Unless I send you off on an errand. I might have to give you a little hat, Errand Boy."

Logan raised an eyebrow, stretching to kiss my chin. "So hats are hot, huh?" He exhaled into my neck, a sweet minty wave of air. "Pretty girl, can we just have it be you and me for a while, though? Just you and me."

"And baby," I added, taking his hand and kissing his wedding band.

"That's all I want," he said simply. "That's all."

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"Honey," I teased.

"_Dear_," he grinned, spinning in his desk chair. "Darling."

"Sweetie," I tried out, as if the endearment were a sweater. We had been dating all eighth grade, save for the month of our break up, and it had been peppered with "pretty girl" and "honey," which made me feel grown up, in a real relationship like an adult would have, us with our real-couple way of changing names into something sweeter.

"Cutie," Logan said, tugging my legs into his lap. The printer hummed, spitting out another page. He ran a hand over my left calf. "Sexy."

I bit my lip and felt my face burn. Say it again, Logan, say it again. "Stud," I said, forcing myself not to dissolve into giggles.

"Am I?" Logan said, a smug smile on his face. He squeezed my knee. "I like that one, pretty girl."

"That's the one I love best," I admitted. The printer stopped whirring, and he reached back to grab our report, everything that we had discovered and learned during our time being married and parents in our health class. I looked at the stack of papers and shook my head. "Thirty-two pages. Do you think we did enough?"

Logan peered at it in concern. "I think so?" He slid it into a laminate holder and sighed. "I guess we'll find out."

His hands found my legs again. What if I let him touch me under my shirt. What if we…we were too young for that. Yes, we were. Right? "Logan? Do you think we'll actually get married? When we're older?"

Logan's face turned red around the edge, like a sweet frame. "I hope so," he said, giving me a bashful smile that made me think of bridal gowns and a big white cake and a first dance. With everyone watching…but that would be okay, since he would be with me. Because we'd be married.

"I love you," I told him.

"I love you more, pretty girl," Logan said back with the confidence that only a fourteen-year-old flush with first love could have. Confident and innocent and sure exactly what the future would hold: me and him. Always, me and him.

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Miranda wrapped her hand around mine, forming a lock around the IV stand, while Emily belted my waist with her arm.

"Walking helps labor," Emily said with that self-important air that made me grin as we began a loop around the delivery wing.

"Was that from Wiki or Google?" Miranda said dryly.

Emily shot her a hard look. "From the expectant mothers book I read. Hello, there is this amazing new invention that scientists are so proud to report: a library? Books, with hard covers on them? Duke has a huge one, I'm sure your college might, too?"

"Lie-barry?" Miranda repeated dumbly, tilting her head to the side with large doe eyes. "What is this thing?"

I giggled. "Ree-ding? It's a close cousin of the novel concept, studying?"

"Now I know you're talking crazy," she snorted. Miranda shook her head. "I worked my ass off to get into UNC. Now, it's cake city. I just need to find a cute guy now, and I'm signing off of effort forever."

"You know," I said slowly, putting my arm around Emily's shoulder for support. If there was one thing to thank the baby for—among all of the other things—it was the weight, the fullness that had stayed in my arms, my hips, fighting off that chemo frailty that had whittled me down before. If only I had all the curves that could be filled. If only. "I have a cute guy, but…hate to say it, things haven't gotten that easy."

Emily raised an eyebrow. "The whole cancer thing might be the reason for it, May, hate to say." She reached across me and flicked at Miranda's arm. "Though, Stephen Hawking, I think your plan has a few holes."

"Hold up, Captain Logic," Miranda sniffed, smacking Emily on the shoulder behind me. "First, part of the problem is that Lee blows. And he's not cute, hot, sexy, or D, any of the above, sorry, May." She held up a finger. "There is nothing wrong with wanting a sugar daddy. Stacey would approve."

"No, she wouldn't," I said. "Stacey thinks relying on a man for more than sex sets yourself up for some serious shit. Unless your name is Davis." But even then…long distance makes the heart grow fonder, but for how long? Maybe I was still the thirteen year old who watched romantic movies and dreamed of her own wedding, but I had silly visions of Stacey and Davis marrying, living close to Logan and I, and our best friend husbands would go off and do guy things together while Stacey and Dawn and I—since Dawn would naturally be nearby—would sit around and giggle together, having the time of our life.

Yeah. I was seriously in Dreamland. Still. I had to hope.

I was good at that.

"I don't mind falling in love and all of that, but I'd never want to give up my career," Emily frowned. "I think that's more important right now than finding my one true pairing. Besides, my twenties are for sleeping around, making out with sketchy people on dance floors, picking the wrong people so that I appreciate the good one when I find them," she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

Miranda leaned into me. "Notice the lack of gendered pronouns. Someone is trying oh so hard to be inclusive here."

"I'm sorry," Emily shot back. "I'm almost certain that I want to settle down with a guy, it feels more right, but girls are incredible kissers." She smirked at us. "That girl from the club last week? Best kisser in the whole world."

With a snort, Miranda grumbled, "That's cause you haven't kissed me yet." She looked at Emily with obsequious eyes. "If I wanted to swing that way, you'd totally make out with me, right?"

"Are you kidding? You're the hottest girl I know," Emily said soothingly, smiling at her best friend.

I scoffed. "What about me!"

"You're not my type," Emily protested with a shrug. "You're hot, Maybelle, no question, but…you don't light my fire. Not even a spark."

"Why not!" I yelped, parking the IV stand as I stared at her.

Emily shrugged again. "Too short, sorry."

"I'm only an inch shorter than you!"

"That's an important inch," Miranda said importantly. "Alan was only an inch taller than me, but it still mattered. You've gotten spoiled, dating a giraffe."

I laughed despite myself and sighed, looking at Emily. "Do you think you'll ever…you know, sleep with a girl?"

"I'm not sure? I mean, usually the girls I hook up with when I'm dancing are like me, having an itch to scratch," Emily said thoughtfully, steering me around a corner. "I've thought about it, just to see what it was like, but I was nervous it would send the wrong message. My work is my partner right now, that's all that matters to me. More times than not, a guy will be just fine to fuck you and forget you. Maybe I'm the new Stacey."

"Emily is the new Stacey, and I am the new black," Miranda said with a laugh. She paused. "Ew, that made me sound like I'm _Ry._ Gross."

Ry.

I shivered and glanced over my shoulder, just to be sure. Suddenly, I felt shadowed, watched. Like a wind was riding on my heels.

"Are you cold?" Miranda asked, squeezing my hand. Her face was painted in concern. "Your arms are all goosebumpy."

"Yeah…maybe we should head back. Besides, I really don't want to have to have a contraction here, for all the world to see," I said slowly, looking into an open room where a man rocked an infant in his arms. Hi, Mr. New Dad, watch me scream in pain.

Emily grinned. "Remember the last time we were in a hallway with an IV stand? Back at the Yale Hospital?"

Riding on the IV. Laughing wildly. Feeling breathless and big and larger than what was in my body and my blood. Just a brown-eyed girl.

"I think my tummy's too big to do that again," I said ruefully.

"Aw, come on, May, you my—brown eyed girl. D'you remember when? We used to sing: sha la la la la la la la la la la di da," Miranda sang, the notes crooked off the tone, as she urged me to sway with her and the beat.

"La ti da," Emily giggled, shimmying her hips into mine.

"You _my_ brown eyed girls," I sang back, pointing at both of them. Barbara had brown eyes, too. The four of us, against the world.

Now three. Just three. Look how we have grown.

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"Goodnight, moon," Emily sang out in the darkened room. There was a giggle and a thump. "Goodnight room. Goodnight chemo that glows green in the gloom."

"That's lovely," Barbara admonished, though I could hear the laugh under her scold. "We're here to cheer her _up_, Emily." There was another thump, then another, and then a muted squeal.

"May! Make her stop hogging the futon," Miranda whined.

"Which 'she'?" I asked, squinting my eyes. My hospital room at Yale was small, but I couldn't make out who was who in the large lump on the folded out futon. The three bodies of my best friends in a congealed hump of kicking legs and abbreviated laughter.

Logan tightened his arms around mine, sliding his leg up and resting his foot against my calves. This bed of mine was so small, but I was never cold with him here. Not once. "Don't make me come over there and turn that futon around," he said in a sleepy stern voice.

"Yes, _Dad_," Emily groaned.

Barbara sighed. "Come on, guys, Mary Anne needs her sleep," she said primly. "Night, Lee. Night, May."

"Night," Babsie," I called out. "Goodnight, Logan," I whispered, turning my head to nuzzle his cheek with my nose.

"Goodnight, Mary Anne," he murmured, finding my lips with his. It was so easy to get lost in his kisses, to stroke my tongue against his and feel like I was diving far under the surface. Remind me never to breathe; you are all the air I need.

My hand slid around his neck. His hand circled my stomach. We kept kissing, and kissing, and—

A gasp. "Are you two _hooking up_?" Miranda squawked.

"No! We were just kissing!" he hissed, burrowing closer to me. "Get a grip, Randa."

"That sounded a bit heavier than just a kiss or two," Barbara said slowly, a curve of slyness on her words. "Were those perhaps kisses of the French persuasion?"

Logan's mouth dropped. "Babsie! Whose side are you on!"  
Miranda laughed, and there was a slap, like two hands colliding in a high five. "Nice work, Babs! Way to move to the side of the righteous."

"Oh, my God," Logan groaned, pulling the fleece higher to our necks. "I can't even deal."

I giggled and kissed his cheekbone. "Thank you," I whispered. "For letting them spend the night. I know this is our time." I know this has to be annoying, at best.

He was quiet for a moment. "Are you happy?"

With my boyfriend and my best friends? All together, creating a little universe that said that maybe I'd be okay. Yes. Oh, yes. I kissed him in reply, and Logan rested his chin in the bend of my neck. _Good, _he wrote with his fingertips onto my hipbone. _That's all that matters._

We didn't say another word, we just held each other there as my best friends giggled into sleep. We shared an orbit, all of us, and it felt more perfect that anything in the world.

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"I don't know how many more of these I can do," I gasped, giving Dawn a grateful smile as she wiped my brow with a washcloth.

"They're getting closer together," Logan said, pulsing his hand with mine. "Six minutes apart now, pretty girl, she's coming."

"She can come any time now," I sighed, lying back against the raised bed. I closed my eyes. "Here that, Miss Isabella? Come any time now."

Stacey's eyes lit up, and she put down the _Vogue_ she was reading. No: highlighting, using small Post-It notes to mark off certain articles and advertisements to reference at a later date, like threading ribbons through meaningful passages of the Bible. "Isabella? Is that the name you picked?" she asked, hugging the thick magazine to her chest.

"Yeah," I grinned, taking an ice cube and crunching on it as Dawn held the bucket next to my hand. "We wanted to name her after Barbara, but—we don't think Babsie wants that. So, this is a name that is special to us."

Dawn raised her eyebrows at Stacey. "Isabella. You know what _that_ reminds me of."

"Oh, I know." Stacey raised a hand. "Isabella was Ernesto Toscano's sweet, good-hearted daughter who fell in love with Roman Brady, who was later revealed to not be Roman Brady at all but the kidnapped and brainwashed Forrest Alamain, now known as former _evil_ Stefano pawn John Black, who is now a superspy and total beefcake of Salem," she said in an overdramatic manner, her hand flopping in time with the litany.

Her eyes glittered as she dipped one shoulder, waxing, "She was a major player in the Cruise of Deception storyline—that's where Jack and Jennifer totally did it for the first time? And Hope died. Well, not _died_ per se, but Hope left the show and everyone thought she was dead, and Bo? Called her 'Fancy Face,' which, oh my God, I always wanted a guy to call me that."

"A guy who rides a motorcycle and is all scruffy hottie like Bo," Dawn said with a dreamy sigh, clutching the ice bucket close to her and settling on the armrest of Stacey's chair, leaning her blonde head on top of Stacey's. They had matching faraway smiles on their faces; I shivered at their sameness. Who the hell was Bo?

"Oh, agreed, though I kinda have a bit of a thing for John," Stacey mused. She looked at Logan and me and her eyes washed with sadness. "See, that's why Isabella's death was so devastating, because John was heartbroken. It was just him and Brady, you know? When Roman and Marlena named Belle 'Isabella' in honor of her. I? Cried," she admitted, swallowing hard.

Dawn put an arm around Stacey. "So perfect. And then, fucking John ended up being Belle's dad!"

Logan's mouth dropped open in shock. "Is this, like, a friend of yours from California? It sounds really dysfunctional, so I'm thinking yes?"

"No, dear General of mine, it's from _Days of Our Lives_. Stacey's mom tapes every episode, we watched all of the red letter miniseries and arcs from before we started watching it in ninth grade," Dawn said matter-of-factly.

"Sami on death row? Classic," Stacey said seriously. "That and Patch and Kayla's wedding when—"

"—when she regains the ability to speak!" Dawn squealed, balling a hand into a fist and giddily waving it.

I tugged at Logan's shirtsleeve. "Angel. I think we need to consider another name."

"Agreed," he muttered, staring in horror at the two girls as they blathered on about Lucas and Stefano and that "Patch" person. "Also off the list is Kayla, Hope, Marlena—and 'Fancy Face.'"

"Yeah, I was really about to lobby for that," I nodded.

"I could tell," he exhaled, sitting next to me on the bed. "You're a wild woman, _tesorina_."

"That's me, living on the edge," I said dryly, resting my head against his chest. "Me and the baby, we're getting matching tats tomorrow."

"I already bought the baby leather chaps," Stacey said cheerfully.

Dawn slapped at Stacey's arm. "I totally got the little motorcycle helmet. We are _so_ five by five."

"Thanks for looking out for us," Logan said, pursing his lips as he nodded towards the girls.

"Hey. That's what sisters do," Dawn said sweetly.

"And the sister of my sister is my own," Stacey winked. "Or something. It was so much deeper when May said it."

I laughed, squeezing Logan's hand. This is how it should have been all summer, the four of us together like a circle of warmth. But we had it now: those two, closer than blood, deeper than love, and my husband and I. We had found a place that was home to each of us, that felt as clean as rain on skin. We finally fit together, seamlessly, guilelessly. We just had to give it time.

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"What are you doing?" Logan whispered as I tugged him under the bleachers. The gym was dusky and shadowed, the game long over and the rest of our fellow seniors probably half-drunk at another Stevenson party. We had the time.

I put a finger against his lips. "This is the best part of making up," I kissed into his neck, then turned away and pulled him deeper into the bowels of the dusty wooden stands, the hidden places that the guards would miss, if they came into the gym to check. But they had while I was watching Logan do drills after the game. There was time, enough time.

We had been fighting for three weeks, the two of us suffering as the basketball team has been losing. Logan did as he had always done, like he was still a little boy hiding his hurts behind the gray wall of himself. Tuck it away, try to pretend it isn't there. There is no stain, there is no tear, nothing has gone wrong. I grew tired of the ice and of the effort of thawing him, and we had decided on space.

That lasted two days.

We talked ourselves back to good at the park where we once ended the You and Me of my angel and I. And now—we make up.

It's the best part, you know.

I ducked us as shallow as we could, with Logan still standing, and wrapped my hand around his belt buckle. "Do you mind being a bit late to Abby's?" I breathed, biting his bottom lip and letting my eyes burn low into his.

"Who's Abby?" Logan muttered, squeezing my hips and swallowing hard. "Mary Anne—"

My finger pressed harder against his lips. "Shh," I exhaled. I licked the line of his ear and sent a line of warm air in like a whisper. "Trust me. And shhh."

I unbuckled his belt and slid down like a sylph. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him wrap his hands up around the step of a bleacher. I wondered, if anyone walked through that empty gym, could they see those ten fingers turning white as he held fast and wondering whom they belonged to? If they could hear his breath coming out as fast as a racing pulse? If they heard the way he panted my name?

If they could even imagine that, as I smiled up to him as I zipped his trousers back up after I finished, how something as stupid and reckless as third base under the bleachers of one of the few places that made him feel like home would be just the start of the things I would do for him. This, this was just sex.

I would steal for him. I would kill for him.

I kissed Logan so hard my lips burned. His hands seared into my spine.

I would die for him.

And I knew from the way he breathed onto my neck and rubbed a thumb over the thick scar that ran under my heart: he would die for me, too.

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"A C-section isn't the end of the world, you know."

"Kristy, not. Helping," I gritted, panting through the end of the contraction.

"I'm just saying! You could get the good drugs, take a breather?" she said, looking at Dawn to get her back. The two of them, good pals for so long now.

But Dawn knew: advocate surgery around me and get some serious hate. The last time I went into surgery, I almost died. Before that? I came in with breasts and came out with the fight for my life. The only sharp object I wanted to be under was Occum's Razor, and that was only with Erin charting the philosophical waters. Pass.

"The whole traditional birth is super significant to them. Because they are geeks," Dawn grinned.

"I'm way over the whole visitation hours thing," Logan said flatly, taking the washcloth from Dawn and wiping my forehead. "How bout you guys follow Jessi and Allison's lead and hit the road, huh? Have I mentioned how much I love those two? Knowing their boundaries?"

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Hush," I whispered. "Angel, can you go call Sharon, see if her flight is on time?"

Logan raised an eyebrow. "Oh, so transparent, oh belabored one." He kissed me. "You'll come get me if something changes?" he asked, glancing between Dawn and Stacey.

"I'm sure the next five minutes will be when everything happens at once," Kristy said in a tone so dry it radiated sarcasm like steam. She waited for Logan to leave the room before letting out a small snort. "Damn, he's clingy."

"She's about to have his baby? I think he's got good cause," Stacey said slowly, pushing off from the chair she was sitting in. "I'm going to go call Randa and Em, make sure they remembered to get extra pita bread."

"Let me go with you," Dawn said quickly. "I can just see Randa chucking everything that's not a gyro right off the order form."

The door clicked behind them, and it was just my best friend and I. Kristy looked—not the same. She was older than I had last seen her, a bit over two years ago, but not in a dramatic way. Yes, she was wearing jeans and a blue sweater; yes, her hair was the same color and had the same feel of hastiness as it hung in a blunt cut above her shoulders, her bangs hiding her high forehead. But I didn't feel familiarity when I looked at her, despite all of the quirks and mirrors to when we knew each other better than some children know a beloved book or bedtime story. Her eyes were so locked from me, etched with experiences and memories that I didn't share.

That she didn't want me to.

That I didn't want to.

She was here on the edge of one of the most important things in my life, but I could feel like my own skin: this isn't what she was hoping for. The time of KristyandMaryAnne had passed, it had waned like a bright moon cycling by.

Logan and I had survived. Thrived. Dawn and I, Stacey and I. Abby and Logan were email pals, Jessi and I were the same, if not closer. How did it come to this place, where Stacey and Claudia, Kristy and Mary Anne were the pairs that took "friends forever" as such a fleeting thing? How did that come to be?

Why didn't I really care, staring at this girl who was my childhood.

My hands stroked over my now-still belly. I was a woman now, like it or not. I had stopped looking backward when I lost my breasts. I didn't have the time to cry. I hadn't in a long time.

"I like your haircut. I think it's cute," I said with a small smile.

"I think I like you not pregnant. The whole yelling in pain thing isn't very you," Kristy said, her smile tilting as she leaned back in her chair. "Dawn said that you two picked a name?"

I shrugged. "Kinda? Isabella. Though Logan's second guessing that," I grinned. "We don't have a middle name yet."

Kristy nodded. "Well. Mom and Watson sent a huge gift for you, but it's coming in the mail. And I know Sharon's been talking to them nearly daily. If you need anything, Watson's in your corner."

"Yeah. They came to visit me when I was in the hospital back in Stoneybrook. Your folks are incredible," I smiled. I felt my throat tighten. Sharon was on her way; did Dad say anything to her as she left? Did he even care?

It was November. I thought…he would…

I sighed and looked at Kristy. "I don't know what to say to you anymore. Is that horrible?" I whispered.

"I don't know what to say either," Kristy said, puffing out a large breath of air. Her smile was kind. "Dawn needed help organizing the shower. I wanted to help, I wanted to do a mitzvah for you and Bruno and the baby? In a way…I guess I was coming to say goodbye," she admitted. "I'll always care about you. But—in a way, this is the end, I guess/"

Yes. "Are you happy?" I asked her, reaching my hand out to touch hers.

Kristy beamed at me, red-cheeked, her eyes open suddenly with happiness. Her hand was steel-tight around mine. "I really am, Mary Anne. I really dig it. School, my summer job with the Senator—oh, girl, Capitol Hill? It fucking rocks! Hell, I even have a boyfriend who isn't a total douchebag!" she said in amazement.

I laughed hard, swinging our hands slightly. "And for that, he should be bronzed."

"I know, right?" she laughed. Kristy let go of my hand and rubbed my belly. "I don't even have to ask if you're happy. You're getting what you have always wanted. You're gonna be a mommy, Mary Anne. Now you could die—"

Her eyes widened and she stared at me. "I'm so sorry," she gasped.

"No," I said in a hush. "It's true. I get to be a mother, you're right. I can die happy." I closed my eyes. "But it won't be for a long time. Not for a long, long, _long_ time."

Kristy stood and barreled into me with a hug so fierce it could shatter windows. "I'll always be your first best friend," she whispered harshly.

"And I'm yours," I promised, clutching her close. She felt different—her body. But it was what was underneath that was so strange. The way her heart had changed since we had known each other's topography by the way we glanced at each other.

We held tight to each other until it was time to let go.

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"May, sweetheart?" the advisor of my service fraternity sang out.

I exhaled hard and looked at Jeremy in exasperation before standing, a sweet smile stapled to my lips. "Yes, Mrs. Martin?"

"We have some V.I.P.s that you need to greet," she said in a theatrical whisper. Her arm looped through mine. "You organized this, people want to see your pretty face."

Waffling my mouth into a chagrined smile, I thumbed back at the table as she hustled me towards registration. "There's so much work to do…"

"Which others can do," she clucked, weaving me around a clump of girls from one of Duke's social sororities, t-shirts with their Greek letters marching across their perfect breasts. Irony: a run to raise money for cancer, during the Breast Cancer Awareness month, sponsored in part by a sorority full of girls who stuff silicone and plastic into boobs that they took so massively for granted. I tried not to glance down at my own flat chest. I couldn't bear to wear the false bra today. That would have been rich: me, wearing falsies as I organized a 5K for _breast cancer_ research. I had only been at Duke for a year; was I that good at hiding who I was?

No. My shirt was tight, and my eleven-year-old boy chest was on proud display. I tugged my baseball cap lower over my forehead and got my plastic grin in place. The coach of the Duke men's and women's teams had already come over to say hello, the sweet, small man who coached the guys' team asking again if I needed anything from him. Other than let my boyfriend's team beat his this winter, oh ha ha. I laughed with him and bit back the urge to beg, _Tell me it won't come back. Tell me. _You are one of the most respected men in America, you can move heaven and earth, tell me, please.

Instead, I handed him his baseball cap and free t-shirt and begged away as Barbara sent me a text message from Israel, wishing me good luck. I wanted to reach through the phone and pull her close to me, but she was on the other side of the world, keeping it safe. How awful was I, how selfish: all I wanted was to know if _I_ was safe.

Grow up, Mary Anne, get a damn grip.

I let Mrs. Martin drag me to a large knot of boys who looked deceivingly like men, because they were so tall and big, looking so masculine even in their baby blue shirts. I bit back my giggle as she confided, "Now, their coach ran off to find Coach K, but at the very least, you can meet the nice boy whose idea this was. He's a sophomore like you! His girlfriend's a survivor, he told me," she said with a drippy smile.

"Is she," I said, swallowing back a giggle.

This is where a good person would have said something.

Can I use the excuse that she practically shoved me at him? Can I? No?

Well. I never said I was a good person, then.

"Mary Anne Spier, this is Logan Bruno," Mrs. Martin said grandly. "Mary Anne started organizing this a year ago. Logan is a guard on the UNC team? And he got his team and the whole Duke team to register for the run/walk," she said, pressing her hands together.

"Nice to meet you?" Logan said slowly, extending his hand towards me as he looked at Mrs. Martin with a confused frown. _What's up?_ his finger curled into my palm.

"Likewise," I said back politely, shaking his hand once.. _Wait_.

Mrs. Martin smiled and backed away, and Logan's face folded in a bemused smile before pulling me to him and sweeping me up, kissing me deep and sweet. "Hey, pretty girl."

"Hey," I grinned, hugging him close, I pretzeled my legs around his waist. "You're going to stay with me, right?"

"You betcha. Though, I heard from a certain Tess that I know that she was going to get freaky with her iPod during the run," he said with suspicion, kissing me again. Kiss me all day and all night. "You and Regina?"

"Me and Ashlee, actually, I went back to my Hard as Nails playlist," I said confidently. "I swear, she's been keeping me sane. 'Outta my, outta my head, get outta my head, and all I hear is ay ya ya ya ya, you're talking to much,'" I giggled, rubbing my nose against his.

"Oh, my fucking God, will you two get a room already?" Keshawn bellowed, chucking his hat at us.

We laughed, and I slid off of his body. My mouth was halfway open as three women walked by. All of them bald, their head glinting in the soft October sun. Late thirties, early forties. One was puffy, one was skeletal, the other could pass as normal. Just by looking at them, I knew their drugs. Their cycle. Maybe even their stage. I could see the basins they had leaned over and vomited in to, I could feel the way their joints buckled and revolted, I could feel the itchy revulsion of their skin to the chemo, the bright red anger of the radiation. I knew the crying jags, the way death could really start to feel like an option, welcome like a lover. I knew the way the mirror became the enemy.

The way a full heart couldn't negate an empty chest.

When your body becomes a foreign land you want to bomb and burn.

Logan's hand held mine against his chest, that strong wall of himself. "Pretty girl," he whispered.

I stared at the women. _Outta my head. I want you outta my head. Get out of my head._

_You're in my head_.

His arms wrapped around me, and his head tucked on my shoulder. "I'm right here," he said. "If it comes back, I'm right here."

"Promise?"

"Cross my heart and hope to live," he said back.

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Dr. Chaplin tossed the rubber gloves into the garbage and gave me an excited smile. "Okay, Mary Anne, looks like we're getting close to show time! You're more dilated than a stoner at 4:20, baby, I'm calling in the anesthesiologist."

Dawn's eyes lit up at the mention of pot, but then she gave herself a jerk. "The baby's coming?" she gushed.

"Yup!" the doctor chirped, tightening her ponytail. She glanced at Logan and me. "Mom, Dad, you two better decide who's in the room, who's not. I've heard that this place has kinda been party central."

"If Dawn and Stacey stay, we stay," Miranda said, her mouth aggressive as she looked over at the other two girls.

"Do you wanna go?" Stacey said sharply, taking a step forward.

Dawn slapped her forehead. "Allison! She's been taking pictures all night, you'll want her to—"

"_Stop_!" Logan hollered. "Will you let us think? Please?" He leaned down and whispered in my ear desperately, "Make them _all go away._"

"I've seen _A Baby Story_, I don't want photographs of…it," I hissed. I looked at the four girls. "Guys, it's just going to be Logan and me. And necessary medical personnel."

"Gee, thanks," Dr. Chaplin said dryly, making a note in my chart.

Miranda's mouth dropped open, but Dawn stepped forward, grabbing Stacey by the wrist. "We'll go in the waiting room, keep calling Mom? General, darling, you'll come and update us, right?" she prodded.

"Of course," he promised. I saw him mouth something at her, and Dawn winked at him—_winked_?—and silently said back, _Of course_.

Stacey and my girls gave me kisses goodbye, and Dawn held my face in her hands. "See you on the other side, Mommy. I love you."

"I love you," I breathed. I smiled at her. "What did Logan say to you?"

"I said thank you," Logan told me.

"'Thank you, _sis_,'" Dawn corrected, winking again. She stamped her feet on the floor. "You're gonna have a baby! A baby! Come on, match baby, we're all waiting," she said into my stomach. "Come and make my sister all better, huh? And then come and let Stacey and me dress you all pretty, we're been shopping at PB Kids like whoa."

Logan rolled his eyes, cupping my hand in his and rubbing it against his cheek. "Well, there you go. That's why we gotta have the damn baby, so that she and Stace can shop."

Dawn gave him the finger and then kissed me again. She hesitated and gave his cheek a brush with her lips. "Just yell," she said again, before waving with each step as she disappeared out of the room.

Logan looked at me, taking in a deep breath. "It's you and me now, pretty girl."

It's always been you and me. A sickness. A want.

It's all about to change.

The pain of the contraction started under my pelvis; I opened my mouth to yell, but all I could feel was his hands around mine.

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"Come on, ref, that was _so_ a foul!" I screamed, jumping up and down.

A hundred heads in the Duke student section turned slowly to stare at me in horror. Shock. Disbelief. Jeremy and Erin cringed; she hid her face in her hands, he stared at me in disbelief and slowly shook his head, sliding an inch away.

From the court, Keshawn and Veron stared at me like I had grown a second head. Oops. I guess I was a bit louder than I thought. Though Logan got off of the floor slowly, rolling his shoulder cautiously and then giving his arm a shake before heading to the foul line, not even acknowledging me.

"Come on!" I shouted to the other students, feeling suddenly naked, even though my face was painted with a large D. "He just got back from shoulder surgery!"

"Yes, May, so we cheer for our boys to _rip_ it off and skewer him like a kebob!" one of the Krzyzewskiville monitors yelled back. "Good God, woman! You have before the first foul shot to redeem yourself!"

I bit at my thumbnail: what did I have on Logan. That he would still love me in the morning if I shared. The thumb sucking? He'd never speak to me again. How Hunter pronou—no. Something with the BSC. The—

"When we were in eighth grade, we dressed up as the cats from _Cats_," I blurted out.

The seniors around me let out an exuberant whoop. "Jellico cats!" A small group began belting out "Memory."

"We're all going to hell," I yelled to Erin as his first shot went in.

The students around us began meowing in earnest, screeching out the chorus of that song in a horrible key. She winced and laughed, "Yeah, but damn if the ride wasn't fun."

The game ended ten minutes later, UNC pulling away for a comfortable win. I pushed my way through the two rows in front of me and a reporter let me wedge in next to him at the press table as Logan came loping up.

"You cheered for _me_ tonight," he grinned. He had a slick of sweat over all of his skin, staining the blue uniform in so many places. His face looked tired and hollowed, and I wanted to carry him home and low him into my bed, care for him until all of his pain went away.

My hand traced the scar behind his shoulder. "Yeah, it just popped out. Like cheerleader Tourette's," I sighed.

Logan kissed me, his tongue curving around the whole of my mouth, like his kiss could make love to me, too. He pulled back and took in a desperate breath. "Room four-twelve," he said. "I'll see you at the hotel in an hour."

"Okay," I whispered, letting him go. His sweat stuck to my face, and I licked at my lips, tasting the salt of his effort with all of the usual mints and gingers and sweetness of him.

Logan began to jog back to his team, but he stopped. There, in the middle of the court, in front of a throng of press, in front of thousands of students and parents and fans, he stopped and smiled at me, and I nearly squinted at the brightness of that face.

"I'm gonna marry you," he said loudly.

"I love you," I mouthed, pressing my hands over my heart. I could feel it so well. Right there. It beat in time with every step he took.

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"Come on, Mary Anne, push," Dr. Chaplin ordered, the top of her head visible as she peered between my legs. "I know you can do this, okay? Bear down and _push_."

I was melting, right there into a Mary Anne puddle on this bed. Someone get a sponge, my spine was in need of clean up in Room Three. "I'm getting so tired."

"I know you are," she said in that same calm tone. When did she become such a doctor, such an _adult_? "But you have to do this. You _have_ to, Mary Anne."

Logan changed his grip on each of my hands. "Come on, pretty girl. Take in a deep breath. All the way from your toes."

"Toes can't breathe," I snapped.

"You sure about that?" he said evenly, wiping my brow with the cuff of his shirt, not letting go of my hands. "Why don't you try."

I glared at him. "You can't trick me this time, Logan."

"Who said anything about tricking?" he said innocently. "I'm just saying, maybe you should try before you tell me that something can't be done."

My teeth set down like an angry mountain range, and I dove down into my body and dragged out the deepest breath I had. The exhale turned into a scream, and my tongue slipped between my teeth. It wasn't the pain—pain was nothing to me anymore. It was the _effort_, it was draining my bones and transforming them into water. I had nothing to lean on, nothing on which to stand.

"Take it from me," he whispered in my ear, kissing my temple.

"How?" I whimpered.

"You just do," he said, winding our fingers like rope and holding so tight everything went numb. The lines between us disappeared and when Dr. Chaplin so smoothly told me _one more push_, I grabbed onto his sinews, his blood, his muscle and yanked it over into me, shrieking as if my voice would end, as if I would end, if I couldn't _push_.

Because it would. I would. _Push_. I ripped my nails through his energy, wrenched on his heart. _Push_.

Cam Geary look alike in the cafeteria.

The scar on his face from doing chin ups.

Blushing over _bra strap_.

The way his face looked in the candlelight from my birthday cake.

Eating cookies on my porch.

Kissing behind a closed door.

A bracelet that felt like a chain, a necklace that felt like wings.

Kind eyes, sweet eyes, blue eyes, solemn eyes.

The smell of his cologne on my teepee wear.

His hands on the tie of my red dress.

His hands in my shedding hair.

His hand, glinting with a wedding band.

_I do. Hey there, pretty girl. Tess, can you move your car? I walked J.D. already, _tesorina_. You are my wife, and I love you, but I cannot do the dishes. Please, I love you._

_I love you, I love you, I want you to live. _

I pushed.

There was a cry, and it wasn't mine and it wasn't his. It was something new.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"I think that's the last time that we can have sex before the baby comes," I said mournfully, splayed on my back as I stared at the ceiling. Stupid baby.

"Suck," Logan grumbled, burrowing his head in my neck. His leg wrapped around mine, and he rubbed at the huge mound of my stomach. His body was still warm and rubbery, and I could taste each one of his kisses, how each one became more tart and rich as it went on. "It was a good one to pause on, though."

"Yeah, it was," I grinned, rubbing my fingers over the curve of his head.

Logan was silent for a moment and then he sighed. "It's not that—like, I can't wait when we're older and adopt and everything, try to have our big family? But I kinda wish that—that this could make a baby again." He turned his head to look me in the eyes. In the dusk, his face looked like a child's, soft and gentle. "I know that's shitty to say, with everything that you've gone through. But I wish."

"I wish, too." I kissed him the way I did on our wedding day. Our hands met on top of my belly, our baby, and held tight. "I do."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

He was kissing the top of her head, but all I could see was the swirl of a pink blanket, as if he were cradling a puff of cotton candy and not a baby. "Hey there, pretty girl," Logan whispered, sitting down next to me. "Guess who got a clean bill from the nursery and wants to see her mommy?"

"I'm a mommy," I sniffed, accepting her in my arms. "I'm _your_ mommy, Isabella. I'm yours."

Mom, are you here? Mom, are you watching? Mom, tell me this won't end like it did for us. _Please_.

I looked at this small thing with wonder. How could something so tiny…_be_? Have fingers so small, so perfectly capped with fingernails so pink? Have a face that was soft and scrunched with sleep? She yawned and a hand jerked open and then closed again, like a spring flower afraid of the frost.

"Angel, she has your nose. And your mouth," I hushed, glancing at him in excitement. This would be the best treasure hunt: I see you, I see me, in this little ball of perfect. "I hope she has your eyes."

"I want her to have your eyes," Logan said back immediately. He cuddled his face next to mine. "It's a _baby_."

"Well…if she had been a toaster oven, Dr. Paves would have already been in here and stuffing her full of English muffins," I whispered back, giggling into his kiss.

"I _meant_, she's here," he said, pressing his temple to mine. "She's here. And now everything is going to be perfect, _tesorina_. You'll have the transplant and get all better, and we'll live happily ever after. Except during football season, cause that's just stressful, seeing how the Lou does every year," he sighed.

"That's how it will be. You. Me. And her. And all of our dreams will come true," I murmured, sliding a kiss once more on his lips. I smiled and then closed my eyes. I was so tar-thicked tired. Why?

_Ry_.

My eyes snapped back open but were pulled shut again.

_Ry. Dad._

I struggled them open again, focusing on that face that I knew as well as my own. Logan was peering at me in confusion.

My eyes slid shut again.

Now darkness.

"Pretty girl?" Logan said. When did he move so far away? My arms felt lighter. There was a buzzing noise from far away. From where Logan was? "Mary Anne?" Now he was echoing. Come back to me, Logan. Come back. I reached for his hand, but I couldn't move. Nothing was working, nothing would listen to me. Legs, arms, head, lungs, heart: everything was glued shut. Except—except—there was an earthquake that rattled up from my toes and make everything split apart.

From a mile away, I heard my angel screaming. And a new crying I had barely time to learn.

I opened my eyes.

Barbara smiled at me.


	37. Start of Chapter 34 and Author's Note

"I'm not a terrorist," Mariah snapped. "You just want to feel me up. Perv."

The airport security guard held the metal detector wand up in front of her, his mouth tightening like line of wire. "Miss. I need you to be cooperative."

"Whatever, Mr. McFeeley, I'm sorry your wife isn't spreading it at home," she sneered, stretching her arms in a T-shape. "Shouldn't you be off hunting for Osama bin Laden? I'm sorry that black lipstick freaks your fuck out, but then again, you do live in Dayton, your world must be small and shitty."

Another guard sniffed at her Tupperware, looking at the yellow mass that was heaped in the plastic container. "What is this?"

"A bomb," Mariah said, rolling her eyes. "It's mashed bananas, mall cop." She flapped her arms. "Hello? Can we get to the strip search? I gotta get to North Carolina like _yesterday_."

The guards stared at her. "Miss, you need to come with us," the first said while the second stared at the container with apprehension.

"What the hell!" she exploded, fighting off the man's arm looping with hers. "I need to get to Durham, I have to get to I See Dead People, get off me!'

"Miss, please don't make us—" the second began.

Mariah wheeled her head to glare at him. "What? Taze me, bro? When did I hit my head and wake up in Stalinist Russia? Can't you take a joke? Please, _please_, I have to get to her, you don't get how hard it will be if I don't!"

"Miss," they repeated, trying to grab her thrashing arms.

"You can't do that to Wally! You can't! You have to let me save her, Wally needs me to!" she screamed. "I can save her, let me go!"  
They pushed her to the ground, rough hands jerking her arms back. When she began to cry, her tears were a tarry black, streaking down her face in train tracks, miserable and thick. "I can save her," she whispered into the ground.

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**Author's Note**

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Uh, hi.

_Oh my God, Onlylivingboy, what the hell is going on? Months between updates when you promised you'd be constant? Not emailing chapters of Meant to Be, like you promised? NOT REPLYING TO REVIEWERS? NOT REPLYING TO PMs OR EMAIL AT ALL? Dude! What's with the irresponsibility, is this how you roll now?_

No, I swear. I have a good reason.

_Yeah, right. LIES, you bake me a cake of LIES!_

Okay, wow, my internal monologue obviously is the Miranda here, huh? Also: hungry. Well. Um. So here's the thing. _Meant to Be_ was plagiarized, and it's kinda depressed the hell outta me.

_You totally suck, and—jigga wha? _

Yup. In a real live, Go Buy It on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble book. Plagiarized. Repeated images, a character…thankfully no witches, if that subplot had been janked, I would have gone against my initial instinct (curl up and cry) and screamed bloody murder on every BSC board out there. I know some people hate my stuff, but I'd hope that all of us who read and write fanfic would be just gobsmacked and we could all throw shit at…something. I don't know what, but at least we all could have been angry together. I mean, yeah, it's _fanfic_, but it's _our_ writing, and it's precious and valuable and I know we all love what we do here. All of us have created tiny universes with our writing—in mine, there are ghosts and magic and Logan's not a dick—and we _love_ our universes as much as we love the books we extrapolate them from. The idea of someone bogarting our universe is…a really big profanity, but I'll use the more sanitized, "crappy" and "stunning" and "really sad" for now.

_Wait, let's get angry now! Hell, let's file suit! My dad/mom/boyfriend/aunt/hairdresser is a lawyer!_

Yeah. So am I.

_Wow. Really?! You curse a lot. And say "for reals."_

You don't have to be mature to be a lawyer; in fact, it helps if you're a soulless git. I was a child advocate, so cursing was a bonus. Anyway, I wanted to be a writer, that's why I changed careers during my quarterlife crisis…and the career I've _always_ wanted—"real live writer" suddenly…is a bit shitty, isn't it. When somebody else _publishes_ and gets reviews in big glossy magazines…and they're using stuff that I wrote first.

I hope you're reading this, Plagiarizer, and I hope you feel guilty.

Oh, what am I saying: you're probably checking the Amazon ranking of your book and giggling merrily.

_What's the book. I'LL KILL IT!_

You really _are_ Miranda, aren't you! No, I'm not saying. Why? Because I don't have enough evidence to file suit…but I also don't have as much evidence as Sarah Dessen did against the girl who janked _so_ much of her writing in "How Opal Mehta…" Yall, getting sued is not in my To Do list, so…who knows. Maybe you read something that had a girl who got a gift of a necklace with seven stones and went, "Didn't…Logan give a necklace like that to Mary Anne? Huh." Yeah. Huh. You would have said "Huh" several times during that book. Incredibly well-written book, that's the saddest part. I learned a lot about how to pull in my overwriting by reading that.

You still suck, you evil stealing stealer-monkey.

_So that's why you didn't send out the revised chapters of MtB_.

Bingo. What if that author said that he (or she) would read? It's sad. I have so many incredible, breathtakingly kind and sweet and amazing people who said they'd want to read…and I'm so scared that that stealer-monkey is hiding in there. It's why replying to reviews has been hard, because…I just don't want to come back to this site, even though…it makes me so happy to upload stories. To write…blarg, now I'm getting a bit teary. It's just been shitty to _write_ lately. My beloved book…can I ever get it published now, now that someone else has taken some of my favorite images and moments? Fuck, _really_ crying now. Thanks for ruining _everything_. You fail at life, Stealer. What next, you're the one who shot JFK?

I'm totally watching "Dying to Dance," starring Robin from General Hospital. This movie is so cheese, I'm feeling better. Oh, look at that collage of bad body image! Dude, where is Scorpio Daddy to give that girl a damn Twinkie! And—score! The Gauntlet is on soon! Here comes the healing.

(Okay. Better now.)

_Are you going to finish Give Me Time? Cause if I don't find out if Mary Anne is really gonna die, I'm coming to find you and kicking your ass. I know you're somewhere in Kentucky or something!_

Ohio, actually, which is just south of Death. Get me. Outta here. London, call me home…

Yeah, I'm gonna finish it. I wrote the epilogue first…after Meant to Be, the ending was so vague (ie, Mary Anne will totally die soon, right?), that I personally had to know how the story ended. So I wrote this epilogue…and then the chapter before it…and then the prologue. This fanfic has been 10 Lessons in How Not to Plot for me, and I'm sorry that yall have had to learn with me at times (whoa, yeah, how many times can girlfriend not die! What's with Mallory popping up and then adiosing! When will Claudia show because I totally hinted that she and Allison Ritz share an artist's studio! And yes, Allison is dating _that_ Ethan, so hello, _payoff please_?).

But yes, I will totally finish it. Just, uh…give me time? Ha ha? No, seriously, I think I can get us to where we gotta be for the last chapter and the eppy in…five, six chapters. _Long_ chapters, and they might be…differently focused? As in…here's one from Stacey! Here's one from Dawn! Here's one from Barbara, all of that, woo!

I want to give Mary Anne her ending. I want to give her and her boy some peace.

(Yeah. That was what it sounded like, if you got my drift.)

_I wish you had said something sooner. I'm sorry I said you sucked._

Eh. I kinda do. When I'm upset, I withdraw from people. It's my M.O. Nobody knows about this…not even my closest friends, either here in fanfic land, in rpg land, or…in real life. Uh…surprise, guys, this is what happened.

I'm sorry that yall got the blunt end of it; I really prided myself on being honest and communicative with yall, and I totally ratted on you with this. I just…really really passionately hope that none of you ever get plagiarized. We all have different views of the BSC-verse (…Logan a dick? Come on yall! And for reals, if anyone was gonna go bananas and rebel like Hot Topic was for grade schoolers, it was Claudia. And Mallory would so equate sex with love. And—yeah, see what I mean? This is what makes fanfic _awesome_), but it's _ours_ and it deserves to be _ours_ and not _stolen_.

It's just embarrassing, and I'm sad about it. So I kept it secret. I'm sorry to you.

_Are you still going to try to get Meant to Be published_?

Yeah. I am. I think I'm working out of the plagiarism depression and then the depressive aftershock that hit last month. (Oh, and my grandma died, but she was so old and sick, that was different.) I had an agent that I _hated_, so I just parted ways with him (him—yeah, I need a _chick_ agent, kids), so I'm back revising for a while before I shop it out again. Just…let's hope nobody rejects me by saying, "Sorry, it reminds me too much of [_insert Stealer-Monkey's book here_." But again! I have a witch! And ghosts! Beat that with a shitstick, ass Monkey!

_Cursing again_.

Oops. Sorry.

_Don't be sorry. Just go write me more of this story and of MtB_.

Deal.

--

Love,

OLB


	38. Author's Note

Hello friends,

Year and years have passed; I've wandered badly, been lost, been found, been lost again freaked out wildly about it all, and then realized that life is a cycle of finding and losing yourself, sometimes several times in the same day.

It's ten in the morning. The day is young, but it is already damn deep. This is what happens when you read Cheryl Strayed's _Tiny Beautiful Things_ to kick off your day.

As I scrubbed my bathroom yesterday-doing what we adults do, which is code for, _This sucks, ew ew ew_-I got hit with a sudden thought to check my old Yahoo account. I wish I could say it was for some deep, mystical reason. Actually, it was because I realized that I have a rewards account with Sephora, and that's the email it's tied to. Oops. So once the Dumbledore-like scrubbing magic of Lysol cleaner was struck dead by my Snape of a toilet, off I went to log into an email account I hadn't been to in ages. And there sat messages from a lot of you.

Some of you asked when I would update _Give Me Time_ (answer: very unlikely o'clock, I'm afraid). Some of you were very concerned that I fell of the face of the earth (answer: pretty much. I moved to New Hampshire for a while, that's about seventy-five miles east of Nowhere. Or at least an hour and a half from the nearest Chipotle, which I think is worse). But most...okay, I'd say the overwhelming majority...were hoping I'd repost _Meant to Be_.

So, okay. It broke my heart-hell, it broke _me_ when I found out that another author stripped parts of _Meant to Be_ and ended up with the published novel I had always dreamed I would have. I dropped out of my MFA writing program, I sank into a hard depression, I tried desperately for years to try to "rewrite" it in a way that it could be mine again. You know that saying about how you can never step in the same river twice, blah blah, life is ever changing blah? Yeah, picture me, standing in the river and waving two middle fingers at the rushing current before desperately scooping up the water with my sad small hands. I didn't ever want to think about _MTB_ or ; I didn't know what I wanted, except for things I couldn't have.

After a few years of flailing, failing, I found something that I was good at-not something I was exactly passionate about, but what can you do-and started a new career. Moved to the big city then to the tiny country and am now in the city again for a year to finish up a professional degree. Not sure what happens then. I wiggle my fingers and say ominously, _We'll see_, but really, I have my heart crossed inside as I hope that we'll see a career that I _do_ love. A somebody to love-and love me back, and not in the creepy way my ex-boyfriend did, y'all that was some serious _what the what_ going on. If you don't think I came back to the city so my dating pool was larger than three hikers and antisocial professors from our local college, then we haven't met. Actually, we haven't, I bet: hi! I'm Mera, how are you. (Heh.)

But I also hope that this is the time that when I find myself-find the courage to make some leaps, find the strength to say no-I stop losing what means the most to me. Which is writing. And the love that is my first book, _Meant to Be._ (Though. Let's all be real, this puppy needs to be edited. I wrote way too much of it in the middle of the night, and the typos make me sick, I need to fix that crap.)

But...maybe the fact that someone else took it doesn't mean it's not mine; maybe it means that it's ours. Everybody here really just loves the BSC, and that love got me to writing this novel that really does feel like my heart, but all of us, we made the body around it. Did that make sense? I want to say something deep about how I feel, but I don't think I can. I'm too nervous and scared to be significant or anything. So fuck it: would you be interested in me putting _Meant to Be_ up as an ebook? Like, a PDF that you could download, read on your Kindle, not have to click from chapter to chapter, that kind of thing. I have no clue if I could revise it and Fifty Shades of Grey this puppy, but who the hell cares.

That's a damn lie. I CARE. That woman's rich! She's practically Jay-Z! I wouldn't have to commute on the L for an hour to work, I could have Chipotle FOR BREAKFAST (because I would pay Chipotle to open at eight am for breakfast! That's how Jay-Z would roll, yo). Let me rephrase: I care, but that's not the point of this, not even close.

The point is...if you'd be interested, then that's something I can do, easy. I'd rather it not be here, maybe on a separate website? For, like, the ten of you who asked, heh. But just let me know, either in PM or in the reviews. And if you would prefer...like, me going through Amazon or a PDF on a website I crappily whip up, whatever. Just let me know. If nobody's really out there and caring, well, that's easy! Laziness for the win. But...let me know if you do. I promise, I'll listen.

It just seems right to be back here at this moment, back with this book of mine and Mary Anne's reconstruction of herself and her world, as I reinvent my own life again. Maybe you would say that it's meant to be.

-Mera, the girl who wrote her first two chapters while listening to Simon and Garfunkle's "Only Living Boy in New York"


End file.
